It's Full of Stars

Not the worst day, I suppose. Hot in the way of summer, certainly, but not overly humid, and already cooling off by sunset. I got in a quick five-mile hike today, and although there was no hint of fall in the temperature, there were yellow leaves slowly filtering down in the air under the trees. This is late summer, as distinct from midsummer, when the heat rules as an absolute monarch. Today you know the monarch is losing its power, and a whole new season will come, and soon.

One of my favorites, too. Autumn feels like an ending to some, but it always felt full of renewal to me. The reason is simple—fall is a new school year in my part of the world, a new page, a tabula rasa, a time when I might have a new beginning and be, with luck, marginally less of a buffoon than I was the year before. God, the madman artist, paints the forests with wild swathes of color, he's in his Abstract Expressionist phase, the harvest comes in with every manner of wonderful food, there's smoke on the breeze and pumpkin pie in the oven. I insist on pumpkin pie instead of cake for my birthday, actually, because my birthday is on Columbus Day.

I got a good bit of work done today. And the hike, and started the day with piano playing, and the sight-reading is actually coming along. This is nothing to brag about; if the progress keeps steady, I'll be at a point by the holidays that is very commonly reached by 14-year-olds who've studied their piano lessons diligently. I'll be able to sit down and play easy pieces pretty much fluently. But there's much sweetness and poignance in the classical piano repertoire. There was a time, a couple of centuries back, when every middle-class house had a piano, and light classical music was one of the major ways people entertained themselves of an evening.

Today, entertainment surrounds us like an ocean—it's everywhere, and five miles deep. But how much of it is sweetly poignant? How much of it tells us how short and beautiful life is? On a percentage basis, I mean?

Well. Anyway. I woke up in the middle of the night, realized I wasn't going to fall asleep for a while, so got up to check on things, maybe blog a little. The insects were all singing. They seem to sing more ardently in the late summer, as if they know themselves that life is short, but of course that's just me. I took out some trash, and looked up. A cool, clear night, as many stars out as you'll likely see in a town with streetlights. A fat planet hanging like a ripe fruit in the southwest. I went back in.

And a few minutes later, I thought of the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Bowman—"Dave," of course—takes the pod and goes to check out the monolith that's hanging there in the middle of space. It opens up. "The thing's hollow," they hear him gasp back at Mission Control, "it goes on forever—and—oh, my God—it's full of stars!"

I thought of that scene because after all, you don't need a monolith, do you? Shoot, on every clear night you can look up at the sky. It's hollow, and it goes on forever, and it's full of stars. I'm not saying that I'm here in my living room, staggering around because I'm overcome with sacred awe, or anything. But that thought did occur to me. And it just felt like an interesting thought with which to end one day, or begin another, as the case may be.