You and the Universe: N.J. Berrill’s Poetic 1958 Masterpiece of Cosmic Perspective

“The universe is as we find it and as we discover it within ourselves.”

In her stunning space-bound ode to the human condition inspired by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome creatures “traveling through casual space past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns” — and yet these selfsame stars made us; out all this indifference arose all our capacity for feeling, our poems and our postulates. That every single atom in your body, if tagged and traced back in time, ...