If a terrible explosion occurred in this star, and if the sound could traverse the void which separates it from us, this sound would take more than three millions of years to reach us.
It is marvelous that we can perceive the stars at such a distance. What an admirable transparency in these immense spaces to permit the light to pass, without being wasted, to thousands of billions of miles! Around us, in the thick air which envelops us, the mountains are already darkened and difficult to see at seventy miles; the least fog hides from us objects on the horizon. What must be the tenuity, the rarefaction, the extreme transparency of the ethereal medium which fills the celestial spaces!
Let us suppose ourselves, then, on the sun nearest to ours. From there our dazzling furnace is already lost like a little star, hardly recognizable among the constellations: earth, planets, comets sail in the invisible. We are in a new system. If we thus approach each star we find a sun, while all the other suns of space are reduced to the rank of stars. Strange reality!—the normal state of the universe is night. What we call day only exists for us because we are near a star.
The immense distance which isolates us from all the stars reduces them to the state of motionless lights apparently fixed on the vault of the firmament. All human eyes, since humanity freed its wings from the animal chrysalis, all minds since the minds have been, have contemplated these distant stars lost in the ethereal depths; our ancestors of Central Asia, the Chaldeans of Babylon, the Egyptians of the Pyramids, the Argonauts of the Golden Fleece, the Hebrews sung by Job, the Greeks sung by Homer, the Romans sung by Virgil—all these earthly eyes, for so long dull and closed, have been fixed from age to age on these eyes of the sky, always open, animated, and living. Terrestrial generations, nations and their glories, thrones and altars have vanished: the sky of Homer is always there. Is it astonishing that the heavens were contemplated, loved, venerated, questioned, and admired even before anything was known of their true beauties and their unfathomable grandeur?
Better than the spectacle of the sea calm or agitated, grander than the spectacle of mountains adorned with forests or crowned with perpetual snow, the spectacle of the sky attracts us, envelops us, speaks to us of the infinite, gives us the dizziness of the abyss; for, more than any other, it seizes the contemplative mind and appeals to it, being the truth, the infinite, the eternal, the all. Writers who know nothing of the true poetry of modern science have supposed that the perception of the sublime is born of ignorance, and that to admire it is necessary not to know. This is assuredly a strange error, and the best proof of it is found in the captivating charm and the passionate admiration which divine science now inspires, not in some rare minds only, but in thousands of intellects, in a hundred thousand readers impassioned in the search for truth, surprised, almost ashamed at having lived in ignorance of and indifference to these splendid realities, anxious to incessantly enlarge their conception of things eternal, and feeling admiration increasing in their dazzled minds in proportion as they penetrate further into Infinitude. What was the universe of Moses, of Job, of Hesiod, or of Cicero, compared to ours! Search through all the religious mysteries, in all the surprises of art, painting, music, the theatre, or romance, search for an intellectual contemplation which produces in the mind the impression of truth, of grandeur, of the sublime, like astronomical contemplation! The smallest shooting star puts to us a question which it is difficult not to hear; it seems to say to us, What are we in the universe? The comet opens its wings to carry us into the profundities of space: the star which shines in the depths of the heavens shows us a distant sun surrounded with unknown humanities who warm themselves in his rays. Wonderful, immense, fantastic spectacles, they charm by their captivating beauty and transport into the majesty of the unfathomable the man who permits himself to soar and wing his flight to Infinitude.
Nel ciel che più della sua luce prende
Fu’ io, e vidi cose che ridire
Né sa, né può qual di lassù discende.
“I have ascended into the heavens, which receive most of His light, and I have seen things which he who descends from on high knows not, neither can repeat,” wrote Dante in the first canto of his poem on “Paradise.” Let us, like him, rise toward the celestial heights, no longer on the trembling wings of faith, but on the stronger wings of science. What the stars would teach us is incomparably more beautiful, more marvelous, and more splendid than anything we can dream of.
