its tail stretched across more than half of our sky. In 1910, as Mark Twain lay dying, Earth actually passed through the comet’s tail. People bought gas masks and anti-comet umbrellas to protect against the comet’s gases.
In fact, though, Halley poses no threat to us. It’s approximately the same size as the object that struck Earth sixty-six million years ago leading to the extinction of dinosaurs and many other species, but it’s not on a collision course with Earth. That noted, Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986. It’ll be brighter in the night sky than Jupiter, or any star. I’ll be eighty-three—if I’m lucky.
* * *
When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country. The Halley before that, Louis XIV ruled France.
Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
* * *
Very little of the future is predictable. That uncertainty terrifies me, just as it terrified those before me. As John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin write, “Comets were the archetypal unpredictable phenomenon, appearing entirely without warning, rousing superstitious awe in the eighteenth century to an even greater extent than eclipses.”
Of course, we still know almost nothing about what’s coming—neither for us as individuals nor for us as a species. Perhaps that’s why I find it so comforting that we do know when Halley will return, and that it will return, whether we are here to see it or not.
I give Halley’s comet four and a half stars.
OUR CAPACITY FOR WONDER
TOWARD THE END of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the narrator is sprawled out on a beach at night when he begins thinking about the moment Dutch sailors first saw what is now called New York. Fitzgerald writes, “For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” It’s a hell of a sentence. A lot changed in Gatsby between the first manuscript and the finished book—in 1924, Fitzgerald’s publisher actually had galleys printed of the novel, then called Trimalchio, before Fitzgerald revised extensively and changed the title to The Great Gatsby. But in all of the editing and cutting and rearranging, that particular sentence never changed. Well, except that in one draft Fitzgerald misspelled the word aesthetic—but who hasn’t?
Gatsby took a circuitous route on its way to being one of the Great American Novels. The initial reviews weren’t great, and the book was widely considered to be inferior to Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. In the New York Herald, Isabel Paterson wrote that Gatsby was “a book for the season only.” H. L. Mencken called it, “obviously unimportant” in the Chicago Tribune. The Dallas Morning News was especially brutal, writing, “One finishes The Great Gatsby with a feeling of regret, not for the fate of the people in the book, but for Mr. Fitzgerald. When This Side of Paradise was published, Mr. Fitzgerald was hailed as a young man of promise . . . but the promise, like so many, seems likely to go unfulfilled.” Yikes.
The novel sold modestly—not nearly as well as either of his previous books. By 1936, Fitzgerald’s annual royalties from book sales amounted to around eighty dollars. That year, he published “The Crack-Up,” a series of essays about his own physical and psychological collapse. “I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” In the end, Fitzgerald would die just a few years later, at the age of 44, his books mostly forgotten.
But then, in 1942, the U.S. Council on Books in Wartime began sending books to American troops fighting in World War II. More than 150,000 copies of the Armed