John Pipkin

The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer__ gasp.

Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one__ place in the order of things.

He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye__ discernment of light and shadow is most acute.

The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude__ach convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves__nd she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.

What has been his cause for searching the heavens day and night, for testing the limit of his reach hour by hour like a man trapped inside an expanding balloon? The reasons were as various as the days they consumed: to grasp the workings of the universe, to find something more beyond earth's fretful compass, to put his name to a discovery and secure fame's immortality, to be able to point to a map and proclaim simply: here I am.

Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.

The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.

Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.

Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.

...but at night when he turns the awkward [telescope] skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found.

So we will cover every possibility. We will take turns at the telescope. I will keep watch in the day, and at night you will take my place, and together we will see to it that no part of the sky goes unobserved.

Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident.

The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future__ shape, look to the past.

It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.

Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.

As the eclipse progresses, a confusion of chattering birds sweeps low in search of dusk and their shadows skip over the water__ surface and it makes perfect sense that these small creatures should be so moved by events beyond their reckoning.

What has been his cause for searching the heavens day and night, for testing the limit of his reach hour by hour like a man trapped inside an expanding balloon? The reasons were as various as the days they consumed: to grasp the workings of the universe, to find something more beyond earth__ fretful compass, to put his name to a discovery and secure fame__ immortality, to be able to point to a map and proclaim simply: here I am.

Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves__his promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view.