Diane Ackerman: “It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery.”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of poet and author Diane Ackerman, born Diane Fink in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1948. She has a knack for blending science and literary art; she wrote her first book of poetry about astronomy. It was called The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, and it was published in 1976 while she was working on her doctorate at Cornell. Carl Sagan served as a technical advisor for the book….Her most widely read book is 1990’s A Natural History of the Senses, which inspired a five-part Nova miniseries, Mystery of the Senses, which she hosted. She even has a molecule named after her: dianeackerone.

In 1970 she married novelist and poet Paul West. They shared a playful obsession with words that was central to their expressions of love for each other. In 2005 Paul suffered a stroke and, as Ackerman wrote, “In the cruelest of ironies for a man whose life revolved around words, with one of the largest working English vocabularies on earth, he had suffered immense damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form.” His vast vocabulary was reduced to a single syllable: mem….

Ackerman wrote about the stroke and Paul’s journey back to language in her most recent memoir, One Hundred Names for Love (2011). Her latest publication is The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (2014).

Diane Ackerman wrote, “It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”