New York missive no 19 - Celestial patterns

In an article in today’s NY Times (need to diversify my sources – not at all good reading the same paper every day), David Brooks finds comfort in an open expanse of sky in a similar way that I did in EWINY 14. But he goes beyond the patterns made by made-made and feathered bodies flying across its surface, to think about patterns made by celestial bodies. Throughout the time he’s been covering the primaries, Brooks has had an essay sitting on his desk, called “C.S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem”, by Michael Ward. “It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, ‘was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.’” He goes on to describe how C.S. Lewis resuscitated this belief in his writing. That “Writers like C.S. Lewis and John Ruskin seized on medieval culture as an antidote to industrialism – to mass manufacturing, secularization and urbanization. Without turning into an Arthurian cultist, it’s nice to look up from the latest YouTube campaign moment and imagine a sky populated with creatures, symbols and tales.”