Sky

In the middle of last week, before the time change, I woke to another rippled grey sky.  Through a small break in the clouds I saw the pale last quarter moon, slightly ghostly. But by the time I had poured my coffee, it was gone, hidden from view as the clouds closed in. It was a week in which I saw almost no stars. But Monday morning, after the time change, I woke to a beautiful dark sky, full of stars.  The main event was the waning crescent moon, rising not far ahead of the sun; so brilliant in the east, despite its small outline, that the stars near it were quite pale. Walking from window to window, there was Cassiopeia low in the north, brilliant Jupiter high in the south, and the Big Dipper getting ready to set in the dark west. The starry sky fills my heart with joy.

In Amenia summers, looking at that dark sky full of stars with my mother was such a pleasure.  I watched and listened as she named the constellations, pointing to each of their major stars, telling the stories of their myths. It was a sweet, companionable time.  When she had the telescope out we looked at the craters on the moon, at the elongated disc of Saturn, at Jupiter with its moons, at red Mars. The sky was so big and orderly. In the daylight, only the path of the sun showed the earth’s turning.  But at night, all the stars moved together across the sky.  Every bit of the sky showed the turning.  The sky I said good night to changed with perfect predictability to the sky I woke to in the middle of the night and again just before dawn.  When we were in the Bronx, and later in Mamaroneck during the school year, we didn’t see the sky much, and when we did, the lights around us dimmed the stars.  So the dark sky and bright stars are deeply connected in my mind with the happiest times of my childhood, the freedom of Amenia summers, the nights out on the lawn with Mom. I saw skies like that again at St. John’s in Santa Fe, but only rarely after that. Now, on our Sunnyhill, the stars bring me that remembered feeling of peace, of joy, of knowing the order of things.

At St. John’s the math curriculum included extensive study of Ptolemy and Galileo, reproducing their reasoning in great detail.  We were asked to think about how we knew that the earth moved around the sun, and why we did not believe the simple evidence of our senses which showed us the sun and stars moving around us while we were clearly still.  We followed the mathematical gymnastics Ptolemy had to perform to account for the measurements of the positions of the stars and planets, those pesky wandering stars, and we saw how, as the precision of the measurement increased the geocentric model broke down.  But still, what a leap to believe that the solid, stable earth was hurtling through space. Galileo was a relief mathematically, with all the measurements fitting into a simple model.  But what a challenge to thinking to make the earth the thing that moved, a part of the moving heavens, and not the fixed center.

I spent pretty much all of my sophomore year thinking about how I know what I know, how I decide what to believe about the world around me.  There is a huge advantage to studying brilliant thinkers who turned out, on closer examination of the evidence, to be wrong. I learned to pay careful attention to evidence, to believe that it was always possible that there would be new, perhaps contradictory evidence, to know that the current theory which explained the evidence might turn out to be wrong despite the brilliance and apparent certainty of the scientists. It’s easy for me to believe that when we finally are able to accurately measure and understand dark matter, we’ll have to rethink our whole understanding of how the universe works and what its true history is. But still, the stars in the night sky give me the happy illusion that we know where we are and how we got here.

Each day is full here, even the days that are full of snow, keeping us in the house.  We read, write, cook, do little chores, watch the snow. It is the greatest feeling of leisure I’ve had since those long ago summers. I feel like I’m getting to know myself again, coming back to who I am when I’m not busy.