Astronomy

The stars. Sirius, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Alkaid, Dubhe, Arcturus, Vega, Alpha Centauri... the tiny and unwilting flowers of the dark, of the vastness, blooming for us, waiting for our spaceships as if for pollinators. We feel for them with the antennae of our telescopes, but never fly out to find them. How frustrating to have been born in the 20th Century, when attempts at them first got off the ground, when men people first left the Earth in body as well as imagination, only for the entire project to have stopped dead in the early Seventies. In centuries, perhaps millenia to come, we will surely be out there, it's maddeningly certain - but not now, oh not now, now all we have is the moon fizzing on our tongue, a first tantalising taste of human presence in space. The last space shuttle has already been mothballed. Things are so bad that Richard Branson has supplanted Nasa as our best hope of a chauffeur onward into the heavens...
Still, they will always have that extraordinary magic of being signals from the past. No, more than that: actual visitors from the past, real time travllers here in our present night sky. Sirius is a traveller from about six years ago: who was I six years ago when the light I am seeing from that fierce blue point first left its surface? The light hasn't gone: perhaps then neither has than person, perhaps he is, as I write, just zipping past the Sirius sytem, squinting and sweating in the glare of the huge young star, and from there passing inexorably onward. What an irony: we ourselves must lose our past the moment it is created, but  it grows instantly into the universe, ripples and ripples of it bursting out to find new presents, done with ours. And they can never be stopped, their thirst for new being is insatiable.
Some thoughts, anyway, on the stars.