By William Sheehan

Published by Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2007 Click to Buy this Book!

This 429-page biography of Edward Emerson Barnard (1857–1923), an astronomer who is best known for his discovery of Jupiter’s fifth satellite, now named Amalthea, and “Barnard’s Star,” was published in its paperback edition in 2007 and, with its new preface, the same wealth of photographs, and 27 chapters that present the biography in precise chronological order, it will prove a treasure for amateur astronomers and serious readers alike. However, even in the paperback version this is a very costly book, although it can continuously serve as a course in astronomy, particularly as the science developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially helpful is the fact that the footnotes are included at the end of each chapter, instead of at the end of the book. Reading slowly, a chapter at a time, will nearly guarantee thoughtful visualizations of starry night skies, and summon many familiar questions regarding the mysteries of the universe. It will also be discovered that author William Sheehan (an amateur astronomer and a psychiatrist by profession) touches upon the meaning of the words The Immortal Fire Within only very lightly and in few places, yet somehow the deeply significant meaning of these words pervades the entire book, as though throughout the long process of studying and writing this biography Sheehan had put this question to E.E. Barnard himself and awaited the answer. What is a biography of this devotion and profundity but repeated meetings of two souls, however separated in time, space, and spiritual dimension? In the end, each reader will have to draw his or her own conclusion as to the meaning of The Immortal Fire Within. Clues are apparent, such as the author’s wariness of the term “sixth sense,” and his touching upon the fact of “immortal fame” as merely in regard to a new astronomical discovery. Certainly the inclusion of this poetic phrase in the title does seem affirmative. “As above, so below,” recalls the anthroposophist, and thoughts of the “Macrocosm and Microcosm” enter anew into the sphere of consciousness.

The first chapter, titled Through rugged ways, describes the boyhood of Edward Barnard, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, a place of culture and cultivation that became ravaged by the Civil War. His father died before he was born and his mother, also raising Edward’s older brother, decided to move to Nashville in hopes of finding work. Edward was born with a caul, and his mother gave him the middle name of Emerson after the New England writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The dreadful privations that fell upon the South during and just following the war only intensified the misery of the impoverished Barnard family. Barnard recalled many years later that his early youth was ‘so sad and bitter that even now I cannot look back to it without a shudder.’” When Barnard was nine years old his mother obtained employment for him in the photography gallery of John H. Van Stavoren, and the boy was soon put to work running errands and guiding the immense solar camera that Van Stavoren had mounted on his studio roof. The camera was named, significantly, Jupiter. William Sheehan quotes from an autobiographical sketch by Barnard: “Through summer’s heat and winter’s cold [the boy] stood upon the roof of that house and kept the great instrument directed to the sun. It was sleepy work and required great patience and endurance for one so young, and at this distant day he realizes that this training doubtless developed those qualities — patience, care and endurance — so necessary to an astronomer’s success.” More »