Sagan was a compulsive dictator, delivering his thoughts into a tape recorder that never seemed far from his lips. The conversational nature of his writing owes much to the fact that he didn’t type, and literally spoke much of the material and had a secretary type it up later. He also liked marijuana. Sometimes the pot and the dictation would be paired. A cannabis brainstorm would send him dashing out of a room to speak into his tape recorder, his friend Lester Grinspoon told one of Sagan’s biographers, Keay Davidson.
The Sagan papers aren’t organized by High and Not High, but there is a lot of material filed in a category with the peculiar name “Ideas Riding.” That’s his free-form stuff, his thought balloons, dictated and then transcribed by a secretary.
For example, from 1978, we find this dictated memo: “Why are palm trees tall? Why not? Because the seeds are so large that they cannot be carried by wind, insects or birds. A high launching platform is necessary so that the coconuts will settle far from the tree. The higher the tree, the further the coconut lands. Therefore, the competition among coconuts accounts for the high height of palm trees which live in environments where there is not a dense competing foliage of other species. To optimize the throw distance, the coconut must be spherical, which it is.”
Sagan did not reveal much of his inner life in his letters, but sometimes in “Ideas Riding” he lets down his guard, as was the case in July 1981: “I can talk about my father in ordinary conversation without feeling more than the slightest pang of loss. But if I permit myself to remember him closely—his sense of humor, say, or his passionate egalitarianism—the facade crumbles and I want to weep because he is gone. There is no question that language can almost free us of feeling. Perhaps that is one of its functions—to let us consider the world without in the process becoming entirely overwhelmed by feeling. If so, then the invention of language is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.”
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