Like most people, I had a few un-reciprocated crushes in high school: Beth, who was one of my best friends; Connie, who already had a cool boyfriend; Debbie, who was a couple of years older than me; and Hypatia of Alexandria, who had been dead some 1,500 years.
Carl Sagan was responsible for that last one.
It was 1980, and every Sunday evening my father and I would tune the TV to channel 13, KERA in Dallas, to watch a segment of Sagan’s public TV series Cosmos.
It was either the last, or the next to last episode in the series, where Sagan introduced the doomed librarian of Alexandria, murdered by a mob. And when you’re an agnostic teenager, growing up on a diet of Heinlien, and D&D in a town where football and Jesus are big, you can feel some sympathy for a (presumed) beautiful, intellectual murdered by a (presumed) Christian mob.
I was angry. You know, how could they? Oh to have had Live Journal or MySpace back then. I would had posted volumes on the subject. Instead I railed on about it to my friends.
The real story is more complicated, Hypatia probably wasn’t that young when she was murdered, and she may have been caught in a power struggle between factions, instead of the target of some organic mob of unreasoning men. But Sagan’s story was a call to action against the fear of reason and knowledge. It lit a fire in me, and even if I carried a torch for a mythical version of the martyred scholar, I’m glad that Carl Sagan told me about her.
