How the light gets in

I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. … Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

Earl Fowler

I thought of that famous quotation from the Sage of Concord the other day while searching for the aurora borealis and gazing at the relatively few stars visible from the city where I live. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the Transcendentalist movement was thrumming along and Emerson was at his peak, of course, city skies were much darker and dim stars far easier to see.

But his point stands. Familiarization and habituation dull our appreciation or even awareness of sights that would strike us as breathtakingly beautiful and numinous, even sacred, if they were rarely vouchsafed to us.

Take, for example, the shaggy crest of the belted kingfisher whose chatter I can just make out as coming from a nearby islet as I scrawl this. The dinosaur feet and iridescent necks of the common rock pigeons, strutting about in ridiculous Chuck Berry duck walks. The majestic way the great blue herons in flight fold their necks back over their shoulders.

Consider the litter of limpet and scallop shells, cockles, clams and oysters smashed to bits by ring-billed and glaucous-winged gulls on the colourful stones and pebbles of the beach, roiled and rounded over millions of years by the water’s deep sighs and exhalations, which momentarily darken the sand glittering in diamond points where ocean meets island as the Pacific draws another breath. Driftwood, bull kelp and sea palm along the shore constitute a lustrous latticework of speckled shadows and torn silk banners.

Three thousand years ago on this beach along Juan de Fuca Strait, which separates southern Vancouver Island from the mountains of Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, there were fire pits and canoes and villages. The horsetails and wild rose hips and camas bulbs the Indigenous people used for food and healing medicines still grow here.

The hides of deer, elk and bears were used for clothing. Grandmothers wove mats and baskets out of the bark of the towering red cedars also converted into shelters and tools.

Go back another 10,000 years, to when the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from the last ice age, and huge sheets of ice could be seen retreating into the sea. Sediment from the melting glaciers, carried on ocean currents, created the sandy spit on which I stand.

A huge block of stagnant ice remained where the estuary on the north side of the peninsula now sits, kept frozen for thousands of years by the gravel that covered it. As the earth warmed and even that ice finally melted, it left a depression that flooded with seawater, creating the large lagoon bordering Royal Roads University that is now home to mallards and ring-necked ducks, green-winged teals and Canada geese, mute swans and buffleheads.

Coasting effortlessly on updrafts, bald eagles and ospreys intermittently patrol the airways above. Murders of crows congegate each fall atop bare limbs of trees killed by a decade of unprecedented summer heat and droughts.

If we were privileged to witness the comical wakes and synchronized diving of these ancient cormorants only once; the long orange beaks and sturdy, pale pink legs of the black oyster catchers as a one-off; as a unique anomaly the laughing calls of red-necked grebes that signal the beginning of a new breeding season, the memories would stick with us forever as wondrous miracles.

Or at least, that’s what I used to think. But given how oblivious we are to the beauty that surrouds us and the peril in which the Earth finds itself because of human avarice and recklessness, one has to consider the distinct possibility that Emerson had it wrong.

For most of the people who frequent the Coburg Peninsula here on Greater Victoria’s Ocean Boulevard, the spit is a place to catch some rays, smoke some dope, stream some music, hang with friends. Because access is so routine and quotidian, we’re inured to what we have here, no more sentient than a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of sweet entropic drift.

But if you think about it with a sense of appreciation or gratitude, rather than our usual glibness or outright boredom, it’s easy to imagine the sea when it’s calm as a shimmering mirror that cannot close its eyes.

Those old-time mariners might have been on to something in their use of feminine pronouns to describe the sea. Rippling out their hasty orisons, her waves become arabesque signatures of Mercurochrome sunsets. Her skirt, half saturated, flops along her flanks.

All men will be sailors, then, until the sea shall free them.

The point, as mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn put it in an observation that helped get me through a period of illness when I couldn’t do much but lie in bed and feel sorry for myself, is this: “When you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting.” Or as E.M. Forster exhorted in Howards End, “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.”

The same goes simply for paying attention. To pretty much anything. Blasé or ablaze: the choice is yours.

In “Nightfall,” voted by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1968 as the best sci-fi story written prior to 1965, Isaac Asimov stood Emerson’s assertion on its head by having the inhabitants of a planet normally bathed in perpetual daylight freak out during an eclipse and descent into darkness that happens every 2,000 years.

Overwhelmed by the hoving into view of 30,000 bright stars not seen since the last eclipse, forced to confront their own insignificance in a much bigger universe than they had ever imagined, even rational scientists hoping to break their civilization’s cycle of societal collapse go insane.

Final line: “The long night had come again.”

Asimov’s fellow contributor to Astounding magazine, Robert Heinlein, also wrote a story — “Universe” — that pivots on the devastating psychological impact of a first sighting of distant stars.

It’s an interesting premise, but I have to say that the Golden Age of Science Fiction, when people were genuinely excited about the tantalizing possibility of space travel and discovering life on alien worlds, feels almost as antiquated and outmoded as Emerson’s gentlemanly New England world of carriages and steamships.

So here’s my idea for a story set today in which a swath of galaxies suddenly appears in the sky like a vast, unblinking cinder wheel.

No one has a religious epiphany to be celebrated for generations. No one goes insane. Only the few remaining people on the planet without iPads or cellphones even notice 30,000 galaxies wheeling in great broken rings upon their clamorous wings. Macworld is too much with us.

Yammer and gesticulate though these Luddites might, sensible realists already know that they’re nuts: the homeless, the lost, the addicted, the deracinated, the unstuck in time, inebriates of the air, debauchees of the dew. Contiguous with the abyss.

The long night has come again.

Still. If you can bestir yourself to look up for a moment, there’s such a lot of universe to see. To hear. To smell. To taste. To touch.

Take, for example, the grating roar of the pebbles which the waves draw back and fling …