rejectomorph | Last Star I See Tonight (Reply)

Long after Venus has set, when the deepest silence of night has almost passed and a pale glow has begun to outline the eastern trees, I see, where Venus lately glowed, another steady star, almost as bright. This must be Jupiter. Last evening, when clouds still closed the east to my view, the two of them shone at once from opposite sides of the sky. If a clear night comes soon, I must remember to look for them. It's interesting to realize that when we look at planets by night we are seeing daylight -- vast swaths of it made tiny by the far vaster night sky in which they are set. It amuses me to think that while this world, seeming so large, goes about its daily business, seeming so important, it is, from other places, no more than one small bright light among many thinly scattered through an immense darkness. Why I should find amusement in such thoughts, I don't know. Perhaps, if I had more wit, I might tremble at my own insignificant transience as I gaze at the vastness of earthly night around me and know that it is, in fact, less than that small star I will soon see fleeing the dawn. But for some reason I cannot fathom, it fills me with joy. I know that I know nothing, and somehow I find that the knowledge of my ignorance is as blissful as ignorance itself is said to be.

CRUDE FOYER

by Wallace Stevens

Thought is false happiness: the idea
That merely thinking one can,
Or may, penetrate, not may,
But can, that one is sure to be able--

That there lies at the end of thought
A foyer of the spirit in a landscape
Of the mind, in which we sit
And wear humanity's bleak crown;

In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique;
In which we sit and breathe

An innocence of an absolute,
False happiness, since we know that we use
Only the eye as faculty, that the mind
Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind

Is a landscape only of the eye; and that
We are ignorant men incapable
Of the least, minor, vital metaphor, content,
At last, there, when it turns out to be here.