Now that it’s dark so early at this time of the year, I’ll walk to work and, when there are no clouds, look up and just flat-out get a worried kind of feeling, like thinking, “I’m a nothing; the universe is so big and I’m just a total speck. What if love has nothing to do with it? Then what?”
Sometimes in my sleep I’ll get a shot of sudden fear by having a quick sense of seeing a distant star, causing my nothingness to jerk me awake and situate my body so I’m facing the earth, thus avoiding that sick feeling of maybe falling out into eternity.
It all makes me wonder how some people can do such evil things … as if the forces that built the universe can’t deal with them and their nothingness in any harsh way they see fit.
I never look at the sky at night anymore, it’s when the ice weasels attack–it’s winter you know. But if you put vanilla beans in your socks and run backwards, they won’t follow you.
Some years ago I made the drive across Oklahoma several times, and it was always amazing to me that the stars go all the way to the horizon there. The plane of the Milky Way is easily visible from one horizon to the other.
…
That, and it’s bad to make a wrong turn in Oklahoma. Because of the way the main toll-highway is long and straight, and out-of-state bail is $300, if you make a wrong turn you may have to drive for a half-hour to find somewhere that you can legally turn around. There are short crossovers every mile or so of course, but these are only legal for emergency vehicles to use–and there are also always car headlights far in the distance–and you have no way of knowing if those headlights are on a police car or not.
~
I do get a frightened feeling, but not the one you described. (I used to get that one when I was a child, though. It was exhilirating and scary.)
The frightened feeling I get NOW is because, living in the middle of Long Island as I do, I never see more than a handful of stars anymore, even on the clearest night in the darkest part of winter due to all the light pollution. It makes me feel not only small, but reduced – cut off from the larger universe, on a rapidly deteriorating planet. (The temporary re-emergence of some of the stars was the best part of the blackouts of a couple of years ago.)
My fear was a kind of ‘reverse acrophobia’ or something: I imagined the stars and the moon just hanging there, out in space, with nothing to keep them from falling. The notion of falling that far kind of sent chills down my spine, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.
I’m still pretty acrophobic, but I don’t feel disturbed by the moon and stars anymore. In fact, I really enjoy walking alone at night during a full moon. (One of the perks of living out in the country is that you don’t get mugged doing that.)
When I was little, I would go on camping trips, out in Penn., near a farm. You can get a real good look at the stars that way. Can’t say I ever felt the way you described, and I sure looked a lot.
I never get any of those feelings, but whenever I stumble out of a bookstore at closing time and I’m surrounded by bright city lights that smother the light of the stars, I don’t like looking up without grabbing onto something. Just looking up at that giant hungry void of sky makes me feel weightless, and like I’m about to fall upwards forever…or untill my blood boils and freezes at the same time and I implode/explode/whatever. Funny thing is, I’m not afriad of heights, just falling into the sky. That’s me all over, man.
Well, I’m an amateur astronomer (at least in theory…it’s kind of hard to stargaze when you live in the middle of ten million people and their lighting devices), so I don’t have that fear at all, but my sister does. When I lived with my parents my dad and I would get out the telescope and the binoculars on clear nights and have a blast, but my sister always refused our offers to look at Saturn or Andromeda. When pressed, she admitted that the endless night sky really frightened her.
OTOH, I agree with Johanna, I find stargazing to be a religious experience. It just fills me with awe.
If I am out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to hold onto, I can’t help thinking, “This would be a hell of a time for someone to turn off the gravity machine!”
I love to watch the night sky. Living in a huge city makes it difficult at best due to light pollution, but I have never felt fear or apprehension gazing up at the night sky. Like a couple of others have already stated, I find it a spiritual experience overall.
Iain M. Banks (the sci fi author, as opposed to Iain Banks the literature author :)) mentions this exact sensation in his book The Algebraist. He talks about it being more something that people suffer from when a long way from their originating planet (IIRC), the same feelings are described though.
I used to be an astronomy hobbyist in my teens, and while I never felt any fear, looking at a planet or the moon through the telescope always used to…I’m not sure how to put it…maybe expand my sense of place. Like actually seeing that dot of light as a planetary disc made me realize not only just how FAR away it was, but that, in essence, I was hanging onto the side of the Earth, stretched at my full height with nothing but my shoes in contact with the ground, on a slope that was basically about a seventy degree angle.
It was sometimes accompanied by a temporary sense of vertigo.
Yeah, I can relate. Or being alone like that and thinking that if the forces that be wanted to pick you up and toss you in the middle of the ocean, there’d be nothing you could do about it and no one would know.
We all nothing, even the big shots. “Paths of glory lead but to the grave.” It seems to me that the only difference between us is that I don’t worry about it.
To really feel small stand out in the middle of the Panamint Valley on the California desert some night and look up at the sky.