What the stars mean to me [Bryan]

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!" -- Emerson

To be alone in nature, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, is to be instructed by a silence: a silence that speaks and also a silence that questions. Emerson finds in stargazing the ultimate form of silence: "If a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches." Stars are, in fact, the most antisocial of things; we cannot pull them down, we cannot use them, we cannot exploit them. They must be left in undisturbed oblivion. Like the objects of our unrequited love, they ignore us and we worship them. They shun us, and in them, we find solitude.

In our failure to connect with them, though, they help us to connect with each other. As I look at the stars tonight, I might see the summer constellations: Ursa Major, Minor, Draco, Scorpio. I see a human-imposed order that brings me into an ancient human community. Perhaps the silence of solitude is about recovering these ancient whispers, these voices that speak from the dust to modern consumer culture. The hushed voices that speak are, to me, the timeless mythologies of human past. I not only think of the arrogant Orion and the victimized Pleiades, however, I also think of the stories of my own ancestors — Mormon pioneers trying to make a new life for themselves, traveling under the broad sky, huddled under these same night lights. My thoughts turn to people who were closer to the land than I am, closer to hunger, to cold, and to world of death. In wilderness, I hear more clearly the language of those who have gone before, a language obscured by the shoutings of modern society.

The stars have tried to make me a better person. “All things are moral;” writes Emerson, “and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.” “Who can guess,” writes Emerson, “how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much tranquility has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain?”

The stars have taught me to agree with Emerson. At the high elevation and dry air of the deserts of Southern Utah, the stars perform a breathtaking dance. Laying on my back in a sleeping bag, surrounded by family and friends, I learned from them, and I continue to learn through memory. It was not so much a package of ideas that were delivered to me, but a positioning, a situating. Looking at the vastness of space, I pondered the huge spaces that I could not control, that persisted through time, and that were indifferent to my existence. No matter what I did, the stars would always be the same. As with Emerson, the stars awakened in me “a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.”

But with this inaccessibility and changelessness, the stars do not tell me, as they have told others, that I am nobody, an inconsequential speck in an infinite universe. I am that, I admit. At the same time, though, experiencing this grand vastness while being surrounded by loved ones, I realized that, while a speck, I am a speck in a particular place. In such a vast and empty universe, my existence seemed to matter all the more to those people in that place. In showing me what I could not do, the stars reminded me of what I could do; in showing me who I was not, they showed me who I was.

Since I moved to the cloudy and populated Midwest, I admit that I have come to miss my unrequited lovers. My boyhood was haunted with stars: whether they we framed by alpine meadows or by the red rock of Southern Utah, they were always there, always the same. I know they are still up there somewhere, beyond the lights, noise, and smog. They wait patiently until I return again to the places of my youth, and I find them there. I will greet them, and they will be the same no matter how much I have grown and changed. They will be the same through my successes and mistakes. The stars for me have come to symbolize the constant, committed, and universal. The stars speak of moral commitment: of keeping promises, of being a loyal friend, of integrity, and of fulfilling my responsibilities. No wonder the great spokesman for universality — the philosopher Immanuel Kant — was filled with wonder at two things: the moral law within and the starry sky above.