Nightglow Window

The Backbone Of Night

One winter night in Joshua Tree a few years back and the freezing sky was utterly clear, the silence so profound that my heartbeat seemed loud.

On my back in my sleeping bag under a new moon sky, well past midnight, the Milky Way hung over my head like a grand tableau of luminous dust, so clear and fine and unbearably beautiful. I couldn't take my eyes off it. It made me feel insignificant, of course, but not alone -- like I had caught a few bars of a grand symphony that I could never fully understand.

The German theologian Rudolf Otto calls this feeling "numinous," a sense of awe-inspiring wonder.

He thought of the numinous as a thing "wholly other," and the human response to it as "absolute astonishment."

Parts of The Whole Shebang by Timothy Ferris almost give me the same feeling. This book contains a description of the large scale structure of the universe. The idea of supercluster complexs that can span a billion light-years in length and whose curved walls enclose vast voids measuring 300 million light-year in diameter.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
--Carl Sagan