If there is something that defines the tormented existence of Edgar Allan Poe, that something is nothing more than a friction between uncertainty and experience; the closest thing to a literary caress that made his poetic imagination shudder and that manifested itself in each of his writings.
However, it was in his narrative essay entitled Eureka where he gave birth to scientific theories long before they became evident.
Poe’s cosmological awareness would also look ahead to the future in his story titled: The incomparable adventure of a certain Hans Pfaall, where he prophesied that the human being loses consciousness from a certain altitude. In this story, the North American author presents us with the adventures of Hans Pfaall who, driven by a certain quixotic spirit, builds a balloon to travel to the Moon. In the scientific projection of him, Poe tells us how the lack of oxygen during the ascent causes the protagonist to bleed from the nose and mouth. It is a premonitory story published in 1835 in the Southern Literary Messenger.
40 years later, in April 1875, three French balloonists boarded the Zenith hot air balloon in order to study the limits of the sky. Their names: Joseph Crocé Spinelli, Théodore Sivel and Gaston Tissandier. Only Tissandier came out alive from that trip, who recounted how he lost consciousness after 7,000 meters, and how the corpses of his companions had blood in their nose and mouth due to lack of oxygen, just as it happened in Allan’s premonitory story. Poe.
Poe’s prediction was correct with regard to the relationship between altitude and oxygen, although he was later wrong in arguing that the layers of our atmosphere reached the Moon or in imagining intelligent life on our satellite. But it is that the latter was something that made people of the time fantasize a lot. From now on, stories will be consumed where the limits of science are crossed and knowledge is converted into a literary metaphor.
One of these stories, published years after Poe’s, in 1913, and written by Arthur Conan Doyle, showed us the possibility that the most unknown part of our skies harbored monstrous creatures. It is title horror on highand Conan Doyle tells us the story of an airplane pilot who, obsessed with reaching the height record, discovers monstrous and tentacular creatures that live in the highest heavens.
Antonio Martínez Ron talks about these very literary things in his book Asomething new in the skies (Crítica), a colossal work that invites you to go on a trip to the heights; a border essay between scientific rigor and literary narration written in detail with an agile style that spares no details.
Martínez Ron shows us scholarly and educational in equal parts; he achieves it without missing a beat for 700 tight pages full of literary examples about the mysteries that surround our temporal dimension. A suggestive reading that teaches us to understand the wealth of states of matter that exist in the heights.
Through clouds and storms, Martínez Ron takes us to conquer the hidden corners of space while sunlight plays with the senses and our cosmic consciousness touches the border space that separates uncertainty and experience. Do not miss it.
the stone ax it is a section where Montero Glez, with prose will, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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