Stars are incredible. It hardly needs to be said–except it really does need to be said. We don’t live beneath the cosmic blanket of glory that most of our ancestors lived under up until just a few generations ago. We have choked out the light of the stars with what astronomers refer to as “light pollution,” a strange term to be sure. We have become so saturated in the lights of our own world, the combined brightness of millions of tiny little glowing spheres that we have blotted out the beauty of the billions of burning spheres stretched out across the expanding vastness of the universe. If that isn’t a parable for the modern world in general, I don’t know what is. When you look up around here, all you see is a couple twinkling little dots of white or blue up there, maybe Orion or the Big Dipper, the only constellations you managed to recognize or remember from your childhood study of the stars. Or perhaps for some reason you can recognize Casseopeia as a clever tool for snagging the heart of that girl you met one snowy night in the beginning of a chick flick. But that’s hardly relevant. Until you get away from it, you don’t see the vast magnificence. Unless someone with a camera brings it near. Which is good, but even then you don’t quite grasp it the way you would if you were out there standing beneath it, watching the milky river of light split through the middle of the purple night, feeling the chill breeze on your face, not thinking about it, but only the incredible silence and stillness all around you as everything but the sky retreats into the dark black. Now it’s the other way around. When the sun goes, the light in the sky goes too, and all the world below retreats into its cozy lightbulb brightness, its incandescent decadence. Or its fluorescent decadence, and besides that, the strobe lights and flashing neon of the night bars and the clubs darkening the world with the brightness of their lights, using light not as a pointer to joy and heat and wonder and truth, but as a tool to manipulate the brain’s natural hunger for illumination–the brain and the heart’s hunger–as a snare for the soul, woman Folly lighting up her glowing Vegas display and crying out for all the simple to turn in here and taste just how sweet stolen water really is, how good it feels to let your streams be scattered in the street, and take your fill of so-called love till the morning. And outside, the stars from their courses still cry out and seek to fight this outcry against them, still shining bright enough….