gursky & beebe

Photograph by Andreas Gursky

At Sagamore Hill Theodore Roosevelt and I used to play a little game together. After an evening of talk we would go out on the lawn and search the skies until we found the faint spot of light-mist beyond the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus. Then one or the other of us would recite — ‘That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns each larger than our sun.’ Then Roosevelt would grin at me and say —
‘Now I think we are small enough! Let’s go to bed!’

--William Beebe