So lovely...and how I wish that salyavin is lurking and will stumble onto this!
On Wednesday, October 16, 2013 6:41 PM, "authfri...@yahoo.com" <authfri...@yahoo.com> wrote: Embracing the void The ancients had gods and pyramids to tame the sky's mystery. We have Star Axis, a masterpiece forty years in the making By Ross Andersen Another terrific essay from Aeon magazine, about "a massive work of land art, a naked-eye observatory called Star Axis....a ‘perceptual instrument’...meant to offer an ‘intimate experience’ of how ‘the Earth’s environment extends into the space of the stars’." The descriptions of the author's visit to the site are wonderful, but he also takes some absorbing excursions into the history of astronomy and the psychology of our fascination with the night sky. For example: "‘One may try to look at the sky,’ the scholar of ancient philosophy Thomas McEvilley once wrote, ‘but in fact one looks through it ... for no matter how deeply one sees into the sky, there is always an infinite depth remaining.’ When we peer into the sky’s abyssal recesses, its blank blues and deep starlit voids, we catch a glimpse of infinity, and, as McEvilley says, ‘the finite mind has difficulty processing infinity.’ The psychology of this phenomenon was described best by Pascal, the 17th-century mathematician who said the starry sky made him think of time’s crushing enormity. It made him see that human life is a microsecond, beset by two eternities, past and future. ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,’ he said. And who can blame him? To look at the sky is to be reminded that oceans of space and time lie beyond the reach of our minds. Who can help but feel small under it? By showing us the true scope of the unknown, the sky forces us to confront the mysterious nature of human experience. It puts us face to face with the most basic of truths — that we are all, in some sense, existentially adrift." Read more: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/star-axis-is-a-profound-meditation-on-the-sky The site on Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/NYCBQ
