I was multitasking last night: stargazing, meteor-watching, and talking on the phone long distance with a friend. Our conversation ranged all over the place, and eventually I got to the nightmares that have plagued me during my fitful work nights. I suddenly realized how dumb it was to be talking about my really creatively horrifying nightmares while sitting alone, after midnight, in the dark, with the sounds of the night creaking and crashing all around me.
And then I remembered my trip to the planetarium last year, and the truly chilling sense of loneliness and isolation that came upon me as the presentation demonstrated the darkness between galaxies. From where I sat in an Adirondack chair in my back yard, the only extragalactic object visible was the Andromeda Galaxy, a faint oval blur near the big M of Cassiopeia.
I looked again at the Milky way stretching across the sky above me; by looking just over the top of my house, I could stare straight into the heart of the galaxy in Sagittarius. Looking up, the arms of the galaxy reached out to embrace me. These stars were not far away; these are our neighbors. The distances to them are like nothing compared to the distances between galaxies.
After that, I didn't feel so freaked out anymore.
(This was originally written as a letter to a friend. After I finished it, I decided to recast it as a blog post. And here it is.)
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Waning gibbous, February 20, 2022, 3:45 AM
2 years ago
2 comments:
Beautiful post D.B.
From The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, Fit the Eighth....
"The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettling big place. The fact which, for the sake of a quiet life, most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings, in fact, do. For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the great forest planet Oglaroon. The entire ‘intelligent’ population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they’re born, live, fall in love, carve tiny, speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death, and the importance of birth control, fight a few - very minor - wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. In fact, the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree at all are those who are hurled out for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed be anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts. Exotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no life-form in the galaxy not in some way guilty of the same thing. Which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it undoubtedly is. For when you are put in the Vortex, you are given just one, momentary glimpse of the size of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation along with a tiny little marker saying, “You are here”.
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