Celestial Musings

… He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void.  Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets – the ‘earths’ he called them in his thought – as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven – excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.  And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends.  Is that the real void, the real death?  Unless … he groped for the idea … unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else.  Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths …

- Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis, chapter 6.

Man, do I love this book!  Lewis’s cosmography strikes me as one that deserves to be teased out, explored and examined.  Perhaps I will set this thought aside for one of those days when the Block hits me and I am at a loss for a topic to write about.  Yes, that sounds like a nifty little idea.

I absolutely love Lewis’s explanation of the cosmos through the lens of a tangible spirituality.  Plus, that notion of light as a hole or gap reminded me of a little post I did a few years ago as an atom as a hole inside a hole through a hole.