Draconian

They were lying down in a parking lot staring up at the stars. He couldn’t identify any of the constellations, literally none. He couldn’t even pick out Polaris, though he’d heard, and didn’t know if it was true, that in a thousand years the North Star would have changed. That someone like him or whatever approximation of human beings were around, would actually be staring up at a different North Star. Life, it seemed, was formed like a straight line, and the idea of discontinuity in that line, an end, a person looking at one’s gravestone, or some secondary North Star troubled him. Death, as he’d learned from reading Sophocles, was the one thing that man could not escape no matter how much he busied himself on earth. And therefore, though some escape artists now made it to one hundred twenty before succumbing, he imagined that death, unlike the North Start had always been a troubling thing for a human being. Did it make any difference if the average age at death was 34 as opposed to 74. Didn’t Neanderthals make burial caves, and Vikings cairns in which they buried ships? No. Death meant nothing more and nothing less than it had ever meant. It was an end.

It was strange though, he said to Thomas, that he could go through life not knowing anything about the stars and still be a reasonable and competent member of society, when, for thousands of years, societies who were now perceived as archaic or draconian, had not only catalogued but developed vast mythologies around the stars, built whole life’s around them. And now that we had the capability to travel to other planets it was no longer necessary for the common man to even be able to identify them. It’s like a love the one you’re with kind of thing.

“You know that isn’t true, Thomas answered. The truth is that it’s so fundamentally weird, the whole idea of going into space, of moving about in a vacuum or a space suit. We’ve become so acculturated to movies that we don’t even think of it as an actual thing. And why should we? We’re aware that some of the stars are so far away that the light reaching us, pase though the thought may be, is actually from a dead star. This is a bizarre concept. We have nothing in our physical worlds that tells us that this is true, that we are that ephemeral in the grand scope of the cosmos. You are very much alive until you are dead at which point we have a lot harder time hearing from people.

Ouija boards aside.

Of course.

They mused on the stars for a while in silence, but it did not bring them any closer, nor even the idea of them. They were still just conceptions, familiar things that could go unnoticed, like a good heating system. “I’ve been thinking,” he started.