Pale Blue Auto-Mobile

You need no ticket to make a place for yourself here where humor, black and otherwise, comes to you from the stage where the human comedy itself is being played, its performance trumping the things dark and tragic and found in the world of literature.

Friday, March 28, 2008

From Fanzine NOVAE TERRAE, April 1938

PRELUDE TO THE CONQUEST OF SPACE

By Arthur C. (Ego) Clarke

I shot a rocket into the air,
It fell to earth I know not where,
But 50 grammes of T.N.T.,
Exploded in the Rectory.

I shot a rocket into space,
Towards the full moon's beckoning face,
And was rewarded for my pains,
By blowing up the Sea of Rains.

I shot a rocket into the air,
But notwithstanding all my care,
Five hundred tons of dynamite,
Blew San Francisco out of sight.

RIP -- Sir Arthur C. Clarke
(16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008)

¶ 12:43 AM

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In Aldous Huxley's The Doors Of Perception he wrote of one mescaline trip and how: "A large pale blue auto-mobile was standing at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image--or rather in the image of his favorite character in fiction. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks." I have it on good authority that the vehicle's color was more like that possessed by the auto on this page and that what Huxley saw, with all due respect, was what Huxley saw.

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