Silicon Insider: Mars Discovery

March 4 -- Watching the news about the discovery of water on Mars Tuesday, I was reminded of Auden's great poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts."

It's the one in which Auden, standing before Breughel's Fall of Icarus in the Brussels museum, is reminded of one of the stunning truths about human nature:

… In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Great events, which loom so large in history books, often go by nearly unnoticed at the time by witnesses as they hurry past on their busy schedules. I've long been haunted by that thought.

How many times, rushing to get a cup of coffee, or too lazy to read the newspaper that morning, or just to stupid too understand the implications of an offhand comment, have I missed the birth of some great historical change — that first pebble being kicked that starts an avalanche two centuries from now?

Will my descendents look back at me and think: Jeez, great-grandpa must have been an idiot — I mean, how did he miss noticing that?

That's one reason I became a newspaper reporter — and then, when that didn't give me time to contemplate the events I was reporting, why I gravitated to magazine stories and books. I didn't want to miss my chance to look at the far side of history through a briefly unshuttered window.