City of Stars (For Just Fifteen Minutes a Year, Please)

I’ve lived in a city all my life, and for me star gazing has always been the process of peering into the misty black void for as long as possible to maybe get a little blink of a white light even on the clearest of days — and I’d be lucky if it isn’t a helicopter.

Light pollution, they call it. All the homes and businesses and cars and lamposts collectively shine a light so bright it shields us from the beauty of the galaxy. Of course it’s a trade off. Increased security at night at the expense of our visual tie to the rest of the universe.

But when you go into to the countryside, it’s a completely foreign experience. No squinting — the cosmos is laid out for you in brilliant eccentric detail, thousands of hand-painted dots intricately painted in beautiful, massive spirals. It’s amazing that these can even exist, let alone when you start to consider their size. You consider the trillions of billions of Earth’s needed to stretch across the surface of even the smallest of stars. How tiny you are, how tiny your problems are, and how impossibly grand the universe is. A full night sky is not only beautiful to look at, but draws thoughts from the center of your being that can’t exist without the crashing sense of scale it brings. A dormant part of your soul is awoken and creates an impossible connection with the rest of the universe.

If you live in a city, you literally might never experience it. Probably due to it’s name, I had always considered light pollution like normal pollution: a long and default task to get rid of, even if you turned off all the lights. But I had forgotten, light is the literally fastest thing in the world. If we coordinated a city-wide blackout, the moment the lights go out, the invisible barrier would be lifted. Right now if you look out of your city window, you see an ominous black sheet draped over us. A shadow. Imagine seeing it wrenched away, a million dots inexplicably larger than our very planet blinking into existence right here.

Even fifteen short minutes of darkness could expose city-dwellers to feelings they literally have never felt before. Even just turning off all of the lampposts would have an effect.

Of course there’d be more crime — criminal’s would feel safe under the blackout, but then again, there’d be the sky. That gut-level-desire to detach your feet from our glorified pebble and fling into the cosmos itself, or to curl into your own body and hide from the reality of how tiny you are. Either reaction leads to transfixion, there’s no other way.

Just fifteen minutes a year. What could go wrong?

—

This idea was inspired by something Harry says in Chapter 47 of the masterpiece fanfiction that is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

“You know,” Harry’s voice said quietly from beside him where his arms leaned on the railing next to Draco’s, “one of the things that Muggles get really wrong, is that they don’t turn all their lights out at night. Not even for one hour every month, not even for fifteen minutes once a year. The photons scatter in the atmosphere and wash out all but the brightest stars, and the night sky doesn’t look the same at all, not unless you go far away from any cities. Once you’ve looked up at the sky over Hogwarts, it’s hard to imagine living in a Muggle city, where you wouldn’t be able to see the stars. You certainly wouldn’t want to spend your whole life in Muggle cities, once you’d seen the night sky over Hogwarts.”

Draco glanced at Harry, and found that Harry was craning his neck to stare up at where the Milky Way arched across the darkness.

“Of course,” Harry went on, his voice still quiet, “you can’t ever see the stars properly from Earth, either, the air always gets in the way. You have to look from somewhere else, if you want to see the real thing, the stars burning hard and bright, like their true selves. Have you ever wished that you could just whisk yourself up into the night sky, Draco, and go look at what there is to see around other Suns than ours? If there were no limit to the power of your magic, is that one of the things you would do, if you could do anything?”

And the post name comes from this lamentful melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTWqwSNQCcg

-Gingerjumble