In 1877, the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli looked through a telescope in Milan and drew a map of Mars laced with channels: canali. English readers mistranslated the word as “canals,” and suddenly a planet became a civilization. Engineers, theologians, and novelists spent the next half-century arguing about who built them. The canals were never there. The longing was.
That’s the kind of story I can’t leave alone.