light
I.
“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he [Kilgore Trout] said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.
“I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn’t matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don’t twinkle. they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites.”
I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was. For all I knew, it was Puke, Trout’s star the size of a BB.
“Do they twinkle?” he said.
“Yes they do,” I said.
“Promise?” he said.
“Cross my heart,” I said.
“Excellent! Ting-a-ling!” he said. “Now then: Whatever two bodies those two glints of light represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other”
“OK,” I said, “I did it.”
“It took a second, do you think?” he said.
“No more,” I said.
“Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.”
“What was it?” I said.
“Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.
All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it a soul.” He paused.
“Ting-a-ling?” he said.
–Kurt Vonnegut, from Timequake [1996]
____________________
II.
Spruce Street, Berkeley
[by Naomi Shahib Nye, found here]
If a street is named for a tree,
it is right that flowers
bloom purple and feel like cats,
that people are leaves drifting
downhill in morning fog.
Everyone came outside to see
the moon setting like a perfect
orange mouth tipped up to heaven.
Now the cars sleep against curbs.
If I write a letter,
how will I make it long enough?
There is a place to stand
where you can see so many lights
you forget you are one of them.
____________________
III.
A time-lapse video of the galactic center of the Milky Way, taken over several hours, as it passes over the Texas Star Party in May 2009.