Collected Quotes

About how we lost the sky ("The Dark Side" in the New Yorker, aug. 20, 2007)

'The earthquake had knocked out the power all over the city, and everything was black. When we got the kids and ran outside, we found all our neighbours standing in the street, looking up at he sky and saying: "Wow".'

"Growing numbers of us pass most of our waking hours in a box, looking at the box. We spend our days in the offices, looking at computer screens, and our evenings inside houses, looking at television screens. Fewer and fewer of us spend much time outside at all, except in automobiles - and when we do venture outdoors after dark we are usually just stepping into yet another box, the glowing canopy that our lights have projected into the sky".

The world turned into a global village must be rephrased as: the universe turned into a global village. With the dawn of light we lost the sky. The incrompehensible distances that surround us are blocked by the lights of the shopping mall. This might give comfort to people who fear the sense of insignificance that the stars give is. It makes me claustrophobic. Its so hard to imagine the overwhelming night time spectacle that people had before the era of electricity. They lived in a compeltely different world. I would like to suggest that it was eletrical light that killed believe in God. The stars always have been the favourite hang-out for the immortals.