December 1973 brought the comet of the century, billed as a spectacular astral display. Yet the comet named Kohoutek seemed to fizzle, revealing itself only in dim smudges of light. When the writer and artist Etel Adnan set about writing a column to ring in the 1 January 1974 issue of al-Safa, a newly founded French-language newspaper in Beirut for which she was culture editor, the disappointing comet was on her mind.1 Had it helped make visible the welcome disturbances in the map of the world? The preceding calendar year had brought news of the last American combat troops withdrawing from Vietnam; the Chilean Salvador Allende being removed by a coup d’etat; an all-out war between Arab and Israeli militaries; an energy crisis. Adnan, as she often does in her writing, offered readers a vantage for assessment that belonged to astronauts and space missions. To her, this was...

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