10 August: Boreham on the Stars

The Calvacade of Night
The tenth of August is the anniversary of the opening of Greenwich observatory. The circumstance suggests an interesting reflection to Australians at this time of year. For one of the compensations of Winter-time, with its short days and its long nights, is the fact that it provides ample time and ample opportunity for studying the stars. And the stars are worthy of occasional contemplation. They represent one of the unifying factors of the universe. Many a young Tasmanian for example, has left his island home and settled on the Mainland. To all such wanderers there come times when a sense of homesickness overtakes them. Everything is strange and they sigh for the familiar. But when night comes, and they gaze upon the selfsame pageant of astral splendour that they had so often admired in another environment, a link is forged which seems to make home pleasantly near.

Many an empire has risen and declined since one of the ancient prophets directed the attention of an exiled and dejected people to the stars that circled peacefully above their heads; and when, lifting their downcast faces, the captives observed that the stars that shone upon the land of their banishment were the selfsame orb with which they had been familiar in the country from which they had been so cruelly snatched, they instinctively felt that there were ties with the old land that no conqueror could break, and possibilities of restoration of which no tyrant could deprive them.

From time immemorial, the stars have seemed to be speaking some consoling and heartening message to suffering nations and to distracted individuals. The thought occurs repeatedly in our literature, but perhaps nowhere more markedly than in the writings of Mark Rutherford. "The provision of infinity in Nature," he says, "is an immense help to us. No man can look up at the stars at night, reflecting upon what lies behind them, without feeling that the tyranny of the senses is loosened, and the tyranny, too, of the conclusions of his logic. The beyond and the beyond, turn it over as we may, is a constant, visible warning not to make our minds the measure of the universe. This understanding of ours, whose function it seems to be to imprison us, is manifestly limited." Out beyond the measured, there is always the immeasurable; the finite, infinity; beyond time, eternity; beyond human, the divine.

The Monstrous Made Microscopic By Immensity
Mark Rutherford is speaking from personal experience. We learn from his "Autobiography" that the stars were ever his comforters. On one occasion he is oppressed by the conviction—the most distressing and unmanning conviction that ever lays its icy hand upon us—that there is nothing in him. He walks beneath the stars, and feels that, in a universe of such inconceivable immensity, there must be room for every creature that crawls, and, therefore, room for him. "I sought refuge," he says, "in the idea of God, the God of a starry night with its incomprehensible distances; and I was at peace, content to be the meanest worm of all the millions secreted in the earth."

Again, he is aflame with anger. He strolls beneath the stars; and, catching a vision of deity and immensity, he is ashamed of the paltriness of the things that have agitated him; his animosities are softened and his heat against his brother is cooled. On a third occasion he is worried almost to death. Walking home, he suddenly lifts his eyes to the glittering vault above. "The effect upon me was what that sight has always been—a sense of the infinite, extinguishing all mean cares."

It would be easy, side by side with Mark Rutherford, to quote Sir Richard Burton, Richard Blackmore, and many other valiant souls who, in the terrible stress and fierce struggle of their eventful lives, found themselves strangely braced and stimulated by the silent ministry of the starry night. It was not sentiment nor aestheticism; it was real life speaking to real life; the infinite above crying to the infinite within. And, in days of acute loneliness, sorrow or anxiety, there must be millions to whom the calm and radiant vision of the unruffled heavens brings a secret and perhaps unconscious sensation of relief.

The Stars Weave The Units Into A Unity
The stars link up the ages. It is a function invariably performed for us by the stupendous simplicities of life. A man lifts a cup of cold water to his parched lips; and, in that act, they forge a link with all the men who have inhabited this planet and with all the men who shall inhabit it down to the crack of doom. He quaffs some more complicated beverage; it quenches his thirst; but it establishes no bond either with antiquity or with posterity. It is the simplicities of life that unite; it is the complexities that divide. Therein lies the triumph of the stars. As Edward Shillito has pointed out, the heavens upon whose wonders a Londoner looks with stolid indifference are—

"The Heavens beneath which Alfred stood, when he
Built ramparts by the tide
against his foes;
The skies men loved when in eternity
The dream-like
Abbey rose;
The Heavens whose glory has not known increase
Since Raleigh
swaggered home by lantern-light,
And Shakespeare, looking upwards, knew the
peace,
The cool deep peace of night.
Under those Heavens brave Wesley rose
betimes
To preach ere daybreak to the tender soul;
And in the heart of
Keats the starry rhymes
Roll, and for ever roll."

Historians tell us that when Napoleon's army, under Desaix, came within sight of the Pyramids, the men stood still for a moment in breathless admiration, and then, quite spontaneously, they rent the stillness of the desert with a shout of wonder and delight. Here was posterity cheering antiquity; the modern cheering the ancient; the world's Today cheering the world's Yesterday.

The fine gesture was inspired by precisely the same emotions as those with which the men of each generation, fixing their eyes upon the stars, have found a point of contact with all the ages that have passed and with all the ages that are yet to be. The sense of the eternal in the individual is so pronounced and so insistent that it is only satisfied when it greets in kinship the sense of the eternal in the universal. In that essential fact lies the subtle and silent eloquence of the stars.

F W Boreham

Image: Starry skies