I posted a poem by American poet Louise Glück when she won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature (“for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”). I was sad to read that she passed away just a few days ago at the age of 80. By way of a small tribute here is another poem of hers I like very much. It is called Telescope.
There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.
You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.
R.I.P. Louise Glück (1943-2023)
It strikes me how comic depictions of astronomical observatories, such as the example on the left, always seem to show the telescope pointing out of the dome like the barrel of a gun poking out of a turret, which they never do. I venture to suggest that a great many members of the general public think that’s how they work also. I wonder why?
In the Dark 