Mood:
brightMuch of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries might be characterized as an outgrowth of linguistic nationalism, or the sense that what is most characteristic of humans and their correlates is a particular language: whether Serbian, or Roumanian, or Bulgarian, or Italian, or German. But sometimes, as in the cases of Hebrew and Magyar, ancient languages had not yet opened the scientific and artistic thesauruses required for an aspiring nationhood; and languages underwent either deep reform or outright reinvention, on the lips of Kazinczy, Ben-Yehudah, and their followers, in rhythm with the genesis of nations.
Yet other reformers felt that their being was not essentially national, but supranational, cosmopolitan, literally humane. Many of these eventually took as their idiom (and as part of their particular form of supra-nationalism) what was at first La Internacia Lingvo but soon came to be called Esperanto (the "hoping one"), after the pseudonym of its author, Lejzer Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish Jewish physician, resident in what was then the Russian Empire. The Esperantists were anxious to demonstrate that their beloved new language was equal to any demand; and poetry and short stories written originally in Esperanto, as well as a greatly expanded literary vocabulary, soon followed. At their first international conference, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in 1905, the Esperantists even adopted a banner for their movement, which featured a green star (for the "hoping one"), against a white canton, all on a field of green.
The green star developed a literary history of its own. Jean Forge, in his short story "Martiro de Nia Afero," or "A Martyr to Our Movement", (from La Verda Raketo, Fondumo Esperanto, Helsinki, 1973) writes of a painter fanatically devoted to Esperanto:
He wasn't just a portraitist, but also did various sorts of fantasies. There was one little picture, for example, that I quite liked, in the strangest colors. A sea, rather red, a gray sky with white clouds, over which a strange rising sun threw intense green rays—and when you looked closer at that sun, you would be startled to see that within the sun was hidden a five-pointed green star!
(My translation.)
But Esperantujo, the Land of the Esperantists, is the only world over which a green star has ever risen. Strictly speaking, there are no green stars. (Due, evidently, to reasons related to the shape of black-body radiation and the chemistry of the human eye. If you wish to know precisely why, it is rather completely explained here.) However, your blogger is willing to stretch a point, if by so doing he may encompass a little cosmopolitanism. And he notes the existence of planetary nebulae, dying stars that project gigantic clouds of gas around the neighboring space. The gas, ionized by the remains of the star, emits brilliantly at 5007 angstroms, and not, for example, at 5006 angstroms, or 5008. 5007 angstroms, of course, is a shade of green—and very close to the point in the spectrum to which the human eye is most sensitive. And by filtering their instruments to that narrow signal of 5007 angstroms, scientists can detect planetary nebulae way beyond the parochial limits of the milky way. Kiel strange! It is almost as if the star wished to be seen and understood.
Planetary Nebula NGC6369
National Optical Astronomy Observatory/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy/National Science Foundation
quizzical
incredulous
celebratory
chatty