“I Have Loved the Stars too Fondly”

Some people plan every detail of their lives down to their careers, spouses, and kids’ pre-school. They fight like litigators until they get what they want. Others, less obsessed, drift through life without a concern. They don’t force anything, thinking it’s all good. I have known for years that I am neither of these extremes but somewhere in between. Something happened this week to confirm that.

I have been reading Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, which is a memoir of his experience in the Communist Party in America in the 1930s, its infiltration into the federal government, and the subsequent Alger Hiss trials from 1948-1950. It is a beautifully written, erudite account of not just the political environment at the time but his personal life as well. Chambers was a broad-minded thinker, and the memoir includes references to all kinds of characters he met along the way: famous, infamous, and obscure.

Reading it has been something of a journey in Robert Frost with way leading on to way and on to way. This is exactly what happened to me. Witness led me to Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy, which is another beautifully written memoir about the untimely death of the author’s wife and his friendship with his teacher and mentor, C.S. Lewis. That, in turn, led me to Sarah Williams’ poem, “The Old Astronomer to His Pupil,” where the teacher tells his pupil, “I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” Finally, that led me to Psalm 91:5, which says, “You shall not be afraid of the terror by night; Nor of the arrow that flies by day.”

Following this trail is not the way of the planner or the drifter. Rather, it is the way of the explorer, who sets out on a journey but without a precise goal, way leading on to way, until truth is found. I can think of no better truth than that found in the psalms at the end of the trail. It is also the way of the detective, who follows pieces of evidence like breadcrumbs until they lead, also, to the truth. I am partial to this image, because I have been working on a murder-mystery novel and am obsessed with the main character. There, too, way leads on to way until the case is solved. In the end, neither the explorer nor the detective remains the same, however, unlike the planner and drifter. Their discoveries change them.

In Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy, he recounts how as a boy he overcame his initial fear of the dark by resting his head on a pillow on the windowsill of his bedroom to watch the stars through the branches of a beech tree. He had been drawn there and realized years later that the “delicate tracery of bare black branches against the icy glittering stars” was his first experience of the aesthetic, of beauty. That was enough not just to overcome his fear but to help prepare him for the suffering of life.

There is something that compels us to brave hazards, overcome fear, even act foolishly so that we can experience beauty. Vanauken describes the feeling as “pain and longing and adoring” all rolled into one, leaving us without words, “inarticulate in the pain and glory.” When I read that, I thought immediately of Byron, which, again, is way leading on to way: “She walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes:/Thus mellowed to that tender light/Which heaven to gaudy day denies.”

It is not only at night, in that altered reality of moonlight through the branches of a beech tree, that beauty bares a shoulder. But night changes our perception, enabling us to detect what is invisible in “gaudy” daytime. Vanauken knows, as does Williams, that we must overcome our fear of the night to touch beauty. Imagine a life–planner, drifter, explorer, detective, no matter–in which we say we love something too fondly to be fearful of whatever troll or bogeyman keeps us from it.

Image credits: feature by Allef Vinicius; camper by Nick Dunlap. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”