Stars

So, reading a book about an amateur astronomer who doesn't use a telescope; thinking about another book I have, called "Astronomy and the Imagination," also about what you see with bare eyes; and remembering standing out in the desert at night, beginning to learn the names of stars and the shapes of constellations, besides Orion and Ursa Major (The Big Dipper, The Wain).

Of course, these aren't names the stars call themselves. And I suppose there are Earthly cultures out there that haven't adopted the largely Arabic names and have preserved the local variations on the constellations, as in the paranthesis above. But I remember tracing the Zodiacal signs and spotting the planets among them, learning the diamond of Corvis and the smaller diamond of Crux, reflecting about baleful Al-Ghul out there in the wastes of Arabia. I was oriented, but the heavens weren't diminished or tamed. It was the difference between a book that's larger than I am because I can't read, and one that's larger because I can, a bit. So many of those dots of subtly multicolored light have names, amid the wash of the Milky Way. It amazes me how long I walked beneath those nuclear bonfires without having a name to call them any of them.

Need to get out to see them again, away from the city, at least once for every turn of the seasons.