On watching the Perseid meteor shower: thoughts on the ancient wisdom of the stars.
Plato in the Timaeus, wishing to assign a cause for why sight is present in our eyes, and why God Himself gave an elevated face to man and ordered him to gaze upon the heavens and to raise the face upward towards the constellations, assigned the very cause that Bernard Silvester gives in his poem:
Empedocles, to one asking why he lived, said, “To see the stars. Take away the Heavens, and I will be nothing.…”
Humanity alone lifts its head toward the stars, in order that looking upon the laws of heaven with a certain method and tenor and constant courses, it may have a pattern for its own life. Starry motion may affect all periods of life. The gods and heavenly bodies, and the stars, and the heavens will speak for themselves, in order that nature can have concealed nothing….
Therefore, as Aratus says, “it befits us … to lift our gaze boldly to the sky and learn of the celestial bodies and the different movements of the heavens.” Of whose beauty, Cicero said, in On the Nature of the Gods, “there is no sight of which it is more impossible to grow weary, none more beautiful, none better for the shrewdness and activity of men.”
Nicole Oresme, De visione stellarum (On Seeing the Stars), translation slightly revised.
On the 2022 Perseid shower, see here.
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