The wave/particle duality of light kept physicists amused for several centuries.
Similarly, today there is a debate between those who believe that the value of fiction lies in its ability to be a mirror and those who understand it as a door.
Fran Lebowitz is one of the latter.
“That a book catches you, that is my wish.
It may come from my childhood, I discovered the world in a library.
It is the opposite of how reading is taught now.
People ask 'What can you learn about your own life from this book?
(...) I think it's a disastrous way of approaching fiction.
A book is not a mirror, it is a door.
Nichelle Nichols died on Saturday (Sunday Spanish time) after a long and prosperous life.
Ella's lieutenant Uhura's in the original
Star Trek
(1966-1969) was one of the first non-stereotypical African-American characters on television.
Whoopi Goldberg remembers: “When he was nine years old,
Star Trek was released
.
I saw her and ran around the house yelling, 'Mom, come here!
Everyone, come quickly!
There's a black woman on TV and she's not a maid!'”
After the first season, Nichols wanted to go to Broadway and it was Martin Luther King who convinced her to stay aboard the Enterprise: "This is the first time we are seen on television as we should be seen on a daily basis."
Seen and kissed.
In the final season, Uhura and Kirk kissed—one of the first interracial kisses on American TV—in a plot that wasn't even romantic.
NBC, frightened by predictable southern reactions, commissioned two sequences, one with a kiss and one without a kiss.
Nichols and Shatner purposely missed all takes without.
And his work for inclusion was not limited to fiction:
Quantum mechanics ended up resolving the wave/particle duality in a Solomonic way: particles can behave like waves and vice versa.
The same thing happens in fiction, a mirror can also be a door.
The one Nichols opened, luckily, doesn't close with her.
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