![]() In 2001, the amateur astronomer John Bortle devised a scale to measure relative darkness. It isn’t unreasonable to think that some part of us is designed to orient around them, to learn from them, and that we are right now failing this part of ourselves. Humans have lived and evolved under the stars for millennia. Thoreau’s wanting feels important, imperative. But how can we know a heaven if we can barely see it? What happens when mankind divorces itself from a true experience of the cosmos, separating from the vastness above, taming it by erasing it? If you keep distilling the problem-boiling and straining-it becomes wholly spiritual. He understood heaven and Earth as separate, but still in some essential conversation with each other-as if to receive one without the other was to misunderstand both. “I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,” Thoreau wrote in 1856. If the night sky offers us one thing, continuously, it is a deeply liberating sense of ourselves in perspective, and of the many things we can neither comprehend nor control. Looking up, the tininess I felt was validated, confirmed, but it no longer felt like a liability. As a child, you can conjure complex, unbound, spooling worlds, but in your own life, you are largely powerless to make significant moves. Little kids are often frustrated by the smallness of their lives, in part because the imagination-to-agency ratio of the average toddler is roughly infinity to one. I understood that nobody could say for sure what was out there. Like most children, I regarded the night sky (or what I could see of it) with extraordinary wonder. I grew up in a small town in the Hudson River valley, about an hour north of New York City. In 1994, after a predawn earthquake cut power to most of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory received phone calls from spooked residents asking about “the strange sky.” What those callers were seeing were stars. For anyone living near a major metropolis, a satellite image of the Milky Way is even more abstract and antipodal than a Brontosaurus skeleton posed in a museum: We understand it to be a document of something true, but that understanding remains purely theoretical. By extension, these populations possess a compromised understanding of the night sky as vista, a shifting landscape of constellations and planets, as multitudinous and astounding as any Earthly terrain. ![]() Questioning the universe’s origins and its contents feels innate to our humanity those questions might be the most human ones we have.ĭue to pervasive light pollution-glare from excessive, misaimed, and unshielded night lighting-80 percent of Europe and North America no longer experience real darkness. It has been inherited and puzzled over for generations. The mystery of what’s up there, where it came from, and what it means has long transcended geographic and cultural barriers. Every civilization we know of has devised a system-scientific, religious, numinous, what have you-to make sense of the night sky. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |