Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed . . .
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
“Invictis” was written by William Ernest Henley in 1875. Henley suffered from tuberculosis of the bone which necessitated the amputation of a leg below his knee. He became the model for Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Treasure Island. They wanted to amputate his other leg, but the famed physician, Joseph Lister, saved it.
I believe that Stephen Hawking, also personifies the spirit “Invictis.” How has he kept from going crazy or giving up? I shudder when I think of him, totally paralyzed and unable to speak, but carried by his questing intellect from the Earth to the stars and beyond to other galaxies untold.
The great Nelson Mandela had a copy of “Invictis” that inspired him during his 27 years of imprisonment because he opposed South Africa’s apartheid.
Then there was Knightstown’s beloved great soul, Jack Bundy, who began to develop muscular dystrophy when he was a young boy. Gradually, it took over his body until he was wheelchair bound and finally bedfast in a nursing home during his final years.
He was Mister Sunshine. I never once heard him complain about his condition even though he could not dance, walk, play sports or have children. Rather, he had a store of naughty jokes. And oh how he loved the ladies! I took him the sexiest pin-up poster that I could find. He had it hung on the back of the door of his room, giggling, “Hee, hee! I wouldn’t want to shock the little old ladies who visit me!” He and a fellow patient got in trouble when they raced their wheelchairs and ran into a nurse’s car.
Those men make me ashamed to complain about the vicissitudes of age and declining health. Hawking wrote, “If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not . . . It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven’t done badly. People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining . . . However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at . . . I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time . . .”
If he could do so, I think that Hawking would be shouting and clapping his hands. On July 4, after a five-year journey of 540 million miles at a speed of 25 miles per second, the orbiter Juno arrived at Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. It is expected that the information it sends back will enlarge our understanding of the universe.
Hawking says that to be able to travel to distant planets we’d have to go fast, awfully fast — faster than the speed of light which is 180,000 miles per second — so that we might arrive home before we started our journey. I think that he may be talking about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity here. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that except for a glimmering when I remember the limerick, “There once was a lady named ‘Bright’ who travelled much faster than light. She set off one day in a relative way and came home the preceding night.”
Hawking said, “Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.” wclarke@comcast.net