I love this snippet from "Star Power," Joel Achenbach's 2014 Smithsonian article about Carl Sagan's life and legacy:
"Sagan was a compulsive dictator, delivering his thoughts into a tape recorder that never seemed far from his lips. The conversational nature of his writing owes much to the fact that he didn't type, and literally spoke much of the material and had a secretary type it up later. He also liked marijuana. Sometimes the pot and the dictation would be paired. A cannabis brainstorm would send him dashing out of a room to speak into his tape recorder, his friend Lester Grinspoon told one of Sagan's biographers, Keay Davidson.
The Sagan papers aren't organized by High and Not High, but there is a lot of material filed in a category with the peculiar name "Ideas Riding." That's his free-form stuff, his thought balloons, dictated and then transcribed by a secretary.
. . . Sagan did not reveal much of his inner life in his letters, but sometimes in 'Ideas Riding' he lets down his guard, as was the case in July 1981: 'I can talk about my father in ordinary converstation without feeling more than the slightest pang of loss. But if I permit myself to remember him closely -- his sense of humor, say, or his passionate egalitarianism -- the facade crumbles and I want to weep because he is gone. There is no question that language can almost free us of feeling. Perhaps that is one of its functions -- to let us consider the world without in the process becoming entirely overwhelmed by feeling. If so, then the invention of language is both a blessing and a curse.' "
A parting treat, featuring a contemporary astrophysicist whom Sagan enthusiastically encouraged --
