A World Lit by Shooting Stars

The exhalations whizzing in the air
Give so much light that I may read by them.

Julius Caesar Act 2 scene 1

The annual Perseid meteor shower was not quite that spectacular but the shooting stars were out last night as our planet sailed through a stream of ancient cosmic dust emanating from the constellation of Perseus. Out in the moonless dark, stretching the neck up to the night sky is an awe inspiring August ritual.

It may be just little bits of comet debris vaporizing in the earth’s atmosphere but to watch for the flash and streak as the “stars” shoot and trail across the sky is to be in touch with an ancestral wonder at the natural world. No surprise the ancient world ascribed significance to powerful natural phenomena.

One required text for High School humanities this summer is William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire – a wonderfully evocative title. It is books like Manchester’s and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror that give us not only the sweep of social and political change but also an insight into the medieval mind – what it was like to live in the “dark ages” and stare at the sky and wonder.

The view of the night sky must have been spectacular.

JosieHolford

Recent Posts

The Soul of Nature: Caspar David Friedrich and Byron’s Childe Harold

A cold, wet February day - perfect backdrop for a journey into Romanticism—off on the…

2 days ago

DEI and Getting Back on Track

Dialogue with Dignity I’ve been thinking about issues of racial justice since I was a…

2 weeks ago

In Love with London Fog

I kept coming across paintings of London by Yoshio Markino - gauzy portraits of a…

2 weeks ago

The Horizontal Man

There’s something irresistible about a crime story set in a school or college. Like the…

4 weeks ago

A Better Class of Train

The two-forty-five express — Paddington to Market Blandings, first stop Oxford—stood at its piatform with…

1 month ago

The Reverse Ferret and the Vicar of Bray

Changing your mind is perfectly normal—and often essential. After all, it’s what education is all…

2 months ago