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Skyward
December 2018
Inner Starlight
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| Photo by Dr. David Levy |
In 1994, Star
Trek: The Next Generation was one of
the most popular shows on television.
The episodes were so good that it was easy to tell that the cast was
especially enjoying themselves. One of
the episodes that year was “The Inner Light.”
It was a beautiful story in which a strange probe approaches the
Enterprise and attaches a beam to Captain Picard, who loses consciousness and
has a dream in which he is living on a distant planet. He enjoys
a full life there, with a wife, two children and a grandson, and he
becomes politically active in his community.
He even outlives his wife. One
day his daughter asks him to watch a rocket launch. He hesitates, but then his deceased wife
and best friend appear. The Captain then
exclaims, “It’s the probe that was sent
for me!”
After enjoying this
episode many times, I was reminded of another beautiful story. Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1824, it is
called The Great Stone Face and concerns a large natural face-like structure
hanging near Franconia Notch, across some granite rocks in New Hampshire’s White
Mountains. The site was magnificent, at
last until a few years ago when the face fell down in a big heap. The cliffs are still there, but no more face.
The night sky is much like Star
Trek, and much like Hawthorne. We
look at a group of stars, perhaps a constellation or two, and our brains begin
to make connections. On Star Trek we share the idea of travelling
through space, even if all we have to warp through space with our two good eyes
and a telescope. Some of us may even
remember chapter 12 of Hawthorne’s
masterpiece The Scarlet
letter, in which the “A” is likened to a meteor crossing the sky at
midnight: “…before
Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the
muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which the
night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions
of the atmosphere. … And there stood the minister, with his hand over his heart; and
Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little
Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two.”
Was the meteor an interpretation of the scarlet A parading
across the sky? The night sky is full of
messages, and only some of those messages come from astronomers. The rest come from people like you and me, people
who have innocently stood up a looked at the stars, and who have wondered. The rest come from Shakespeare, and Tennyson, and
perhaps even Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The next time you look at the
stars, picture yourself not just watching them but reading them. Learn the stories they tell, as interpreted
by your favorite writers whether
they be Shakespeare, Tennyson,
Hawthorne, or even you. What
sparks your imagination can be something as simple as a story you have heard,
seen read, or even written. Even in our
modern age, the message could indeed be
written in the stars.
