• "The stars around the fair moon fade / Against the night. / When gazing full she fills the glad / And spreads the seeds with silvery light." -- Sappho
• "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Space is filled with a network of wormholes. You might emerge somewhere else in space, some when-else in time. The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. A still more glorious dawn awaits. Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise. A morning filled with 400 billion suns, the rising of the milky way. The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos, in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. But the brain does much more than just recollect — it inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions. The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning. The brain has it’s own language for testing the structure & consistency of the world. For thousands of years, people have wondered about the universe. Did it stretch out forever, or was there a limit? From the big bang to black holes, from dark matter to a possible big crunch, our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas. How lucky we are to live in this time, the first moment in human history, when we are in fact visiting other worlds. The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, & the water seems inviting. -- Carl Sagan & Stephen Hawking
• "Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was once thought, whihc are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of hte mist of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by." -- Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
• "Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars…” -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The End of the World

Lost in reverie Let's amuse ourselves Selfishly The beginning of the universe, namely the opening of destiny The creation of heaven and Earth, namely the birth of destiny The legend of Genesis, namely the creation of destiny Natural selection, namely selection by destiny We should know it well It is our mirror Even so That appearance Are we flesh? Even so Eternity Absence We become Only A fortuity Allegory, allegorier, allegoriest