A friend emailed me a great quote from the great James Lileks — the genius of the Internet — and I’ll use it in a post next week.
But in the meantime, particularly as we approach Shabbat, here is a nice excerpt from his Bleat yesterday.
He’s on vacation, in a cabin in the woods in the middle of Minnesota, with his young daughter, and he walks alone outside at night and looks up at the sky (the bolding is his):
My stars. It’s full of God.
I went back into the cabin, got Gnat out of bed. She held my hand as we walked around to the front; I told her to look down. We got to the middle of the lawn between the cabin and the shore, and laid down and looked up.
She gasped.
It’s so beautiful, she said. We saw the clouds of stars, the bright ones burning a billion years away, the dim pricks in the firmament that probably represented an entire galaxy, or two, and as usual you remember the wise man’s formulation: either we are alone or we are not, and either is astonishing. Although each has its own implications.
We laid in the grass for a few minutes, holding hands, looking up at the stars. Your mind goes through moods quite quickly — they’re pitiless, indifferent; they’re somehow benevolent. They’re remote but tantalizingly close. They overwhelm with their numbers, yet you can ignore them all by studying one, and giving it the full force of your conjecture. A choir of light, a million silent voices, one great chord you cannot begin to imagine — but you’d know it if you heard it.
We went inside, and she read a Spongebob book. I came out to the porch to write.
Even the light of the laptop drives the stars away. It’s amazing: I hold down the brightness key while looking straight ahead, and the Big Dipper emerges in the sky, clearer and bigger than I’ve ever seen before. There has to be a lesson here.
Shabbat Shalom.
[Sunday — Shavua tov. If you have read this post, you must read Brother Mel’s wonderful comment below. [Monday — and Yael’s discussion that follows].