A New Way of Seeing

Once upon a time I stretched out flat on a lawn chair, fully reclined, prone against the night sky, eyes wide open – waiting for the show to begin.

There were a dozen of us, maybe more, neighbors on aluminum cots, our friendship fueled by excessive caffeine and warmed by the remaining embers of a waning campfire. Patience was required of us, but we filled the pre-matinee vacuum with jokes and stories, boasting of the sort of long-ago adventures that become far better with each retelling.

Then the show began, quieting us, and we lay there side-by-side as a meteor shower shattered the silence of a South Dakota sky in mid August. Fireballs hurled by unseen gods thundered across empty space and blazed into infinity, ending not with bangs but with whimpers.

Nothing we watched was detonated by human hands, no careful mix of gunsmoke shot tiny balls of explosive arrays upward to awe our tiny crowd. We were caught in the grasp of the mighty Perseids, remnants of a long-ago comet, shattered and racing toward nowhere.

Philosophers love the sort of questions posed by that long-ago night. “If a meteor shower dances across the night sky, and no one lies down on a cot to see it, did it really happen?” Questions such as these help explain why so many promising students of philosophy end up as cab drivers, a noble and much-needed profession.

Some of us had not showered that day, but the meteors did. This objective display was set in motion long before our camping trip was dreamed or planned: it was our good fortune merely to arrive in the best place to see it. For that night at least, the Badlands were Good places. We did not imagine this, individually or collectively, but we were witnesses to a divine moment, hushed of our boasting by the kind of awe that places wee (sic) humans in perspective.

Annie Dillard talks about this in describing our search for God. Here is Dillard:

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

“Experience has taught the (human) race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates…You do not have to do these things – unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”
---- excerpts from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard