inferno xxxiv 139
It was a Saturday night that was getting colder, in early October. We had driven out for the day to the park, only an hour or so from the city. Time was measured in minutes here, even though this was a different hour than normal. Not an hour driving on the optimally curved two-lane interstates, roaring past cornfields and small towns with one conveniently placed gas station, but an hour minutes driving on “the backroads”. The backroads were straight gridded, too rigid to get you where you needed to go at the usual pace. We went by the wind farms that soaked up the inexhaustible emptiness of the former prairie. We went by the pumpkin patches, acres full-sized pumpkins vined across the ground, that would eventually sit in grocery stores and then be carved by children and then rot. All of the space was used, by something, something that the city couldn’t fit but needed.
When we drove back it was dark. The pumpkin patches and wind farms and everything else was washed away in the blackness of the night and only the stars remained. The ground was flat, so the light pollution of the city was visible in the distance, a gray haze that was the destination. The stars above us in the prairie sky were sharp and so much richer than they were in the city. We couldn’t stop looking at them, leaning forward to look up through the windshield of the car, so we pulled over. Standing in the harvested cornfields, three thousand feet from the house of whoever ran the cornfields, we looked at the stars, still just as sharp as they had been in the car. It was cold, but looking at the stars demands the cold, since the stars have to sit in a cold black void forever.
“It’s crazy that the stars have burned the same way throughout the entirety of human history. Stars do live and die like us, but thousands of years ago the night sky was still exactly the same because their timescale is so different from ours. Everyone that’s ever lived has looked up at the stars the same way we do now.”
“I mean it’s not exactly the same. We have to go out here to see the stars, for them the stars were with them every day, even at home. The stars are more primal to us, you have to go out of the city to see them, like animals or water.”
“Are the stars more primal for us though? They didn’t know what the stars were, they were just marks on the black canvas. For us, we know what they are, that they’re balls of fire in the sky incomprehensibly far away. That if I lay on the ground, the stars that are above us now are actually straight ahead, and if I were able to reach far enough I’d be able to touch them, but in my lifetime I’ll never reach far enough.”
“I don’t know about you, but when I look at the stars, I don’t see balls of fire. They’re blue white purple marks in the black canvas above. I know if I lay down, the stars are forward and we exist in the same plane as them, clinging to a ball spinning through the grimy vasty vault of space, but when as we’re sitting here now, I’m looking up at the stars. And the reason I can’t stop looking at them is because I have to look up.”
Then we got back in the car and drove home.
