Why the revolution, the giddy interminable spin around that star? With those other bodies, some gliding swiftly, some lumbering slowly by. We spin round meaninglessly, like a cork in a whirlpool. Involuntary obedience to imponderable "laws of nature"- vast, sad, immutable laws. A machine which seems to have no function, and to produce mere coincidences of inexplicable, huge phenomena. If a deity's hand had set the planets in order, how cruel of him to leave them so empty, so devoid of life or interest. Dusty balls of rock, vaccuous gas giants, moons spattered with craters. So that hopeful mankind, emerging from the cradle of his planet, could reach out to them and find himself, once again, alone. He finds nothing but the playing out of the same empty and hostile processes- Clouds of acid gas, dull volcanoes, distant dust storms. Barren wasteland upon barren wasteland. Man, in gazing out into the universe, is merely confronted with his own uniqueness- and is thereby a valuable lesson.
But i see lonely Venus, a pinpoint of light in the sky. I see her in the evening when she comes with a great luminescent blue haze from the horizon. She is also seen in cold grey ragged dawns, with the sky behind paling thinly. She's the only planet i've ever seen. The others lie even further out, behind the deepest folds of velvety space, across unimaginable distances. They have all the intangibility and mystery of the old dead gods they are named after. If they appear at all it must only be as an imperceptible pinprick of light. But to me, an object seen in the sky, astoundingly distant, disconcertingly alien, ceases to be a point of philosophy abstractly speculated about. Instead, i am imparted suddenly with a deep feeling of mystery and awe, and those laws of nature which i, with superficial objectivity, thought to be meaningless seem in practice to be quite beautiful, grand, and significant. Perhaps this is no answer at all, or only half an answer- But i only know (and the knowledge suffices for me) that the star that comes over the horizon and brings the day with it does so for a reason.
