The Backbone of Night

The Backbone of Night

I would rather understand one cause than be King of Persia (Democritus of Abdera).

Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron Von Holbach, Système de la Nature, London, 1770:

If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon divinity, he would be oblidged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed.; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods… When, therefore he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon… does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?

When Carl Sagan was little, he lived in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in the City of New York. He knew his immediate neighborhood intimately, every apartment building, every pigeon coop, backyard, front stoop, empty lot, elm tree, ornamental railing, coal chute and wall for playing Chinese handball, among which the brick exterior of a theater called the Loew’s Stillwell was of superior quality. He knew where many people lived : Bruno and Dino, Ronald and Harvey, Sandy, Berny, Jackie, Danny and Myra. But more than a few blocks away, north of the raucous automobile traffic and elevated railway on 86th Street, was a strange unknown territory, off-limits to his wanderings. It could have been Mars for all Sagan knew.

What are the stars in the sky? Are you sure you know the right answer? (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: Fashion Pattern Print As For Clothing by © Megan (Elena)

Even with an early bedtime, in winter, you could sometimes see the stars. Carl would look at them, twinkling and remote, and wonder what they were. He would ask other children and adults, who would only reply: “They are lights in the sky, kid”. But he could see they were lights in the sky. But what were they? Just small hovering lamps? Whatever for? He felt a kind of sorrow for them: a commonplace whose strangeness remained somehow hidden Carl’s incurious fellows. There had to be some deeper answer.