Reading Jules Verne by Flashlight

I was a childhood insomniac—now I can barely make it past 8 o’clock, but back in my tweens I’d stay up all night reading, afraid to close my eyes against the dark night. I shared a room with my sister and when she had turned out the light—or, most likely, made ME turn off the light (she had a way of jumping into bed and pulling the covers over her head and demanding I get out of bed and do the duty). I’d then instead of returning to my bed, I’d head to the closet, close the door, turn on the light and live another life.

There was a summer there where I discovered the works of Jules Verne, what might now be considered “soft” science fiction.” I was continually amazed at how he had predicted technical and scientific advancements that came after him. Maybe it was the time period: the thrill of industrialization, that modern man could build whatever they needed. The power of the steam engine. The only thing man couldn’t fix was himself, the turning of all that industrial know-how into killing one another. The industrial war machine. Jules Verne foresaw it all.

Maybe not all, but a good deal of the depravity, of the ways we can do harm. We had evolved to a point where we were going to de-evolve. In the 1970s I fully understood this after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the formation of the EPA to protect species going extinct such as the national symbol the Bald Eagle.

So I read Jules Verne much like I did the Old Testament, looking for signs. Much like Jules Verne, I thought if we could just figure things out we can become agents of change. But, like so much of science fiction, it is fiction. The planet as well as the humans who inhabit it have charted its own course.

Yet, at times, I find myself back there, in the closet, reading late into the night, soaring in a balloon or under the sea, exploring in novel ways the world around me. My sister asleep somewhere in a state far, far away, in a space no longer shared.