Talking Points - On the Recentness of What We Know by Verlyn Klinkenborg

New York Times: "The other night I took the dogs for a walk in the pasture. It was a cloudless evening with low humidity, a rare event in this damp, northeastern summer. I always look up at the stars when I’m outside in the dark, but all too often, even here in the country, they’re obscured by haze. Not that night. They shone with a brightness, a clarity I’d almost forgotten. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis, Lyra, the red light of Arcturus in the west, the diffuse band of the Milky Way arching overhead—their presence was overwhelming. And yet, somehow, when the stars look close to earth it’s easier to imagine how far away they really are. It was a warm July night, but I could almost feel the chill of space. I’ve been watching the stars for nearly half a century now. Not much has changed up there. The sky is a memory in itself. I stared at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through a small telescope of my own when I was a boy in Iowa. I spent part of a summer watching meteors while I was helping my family build a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and part of a winter star-gazing from the top of a mesa on the Hopi Reservation, where somehow the smell of cedar mingled with the light of the moon. The only thing that has changed in all that time—apart from a few new satellites crossing the sky—is the state of my knowledge."