Chapter 09: Cities and the Sky 04
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In this city, the sky was a city, and the sky was a place, and the sky contained clouds that did not merely grant shelter from a radiant wind but kept the earth in a luminous immensity with their vagrant shifting clouds, their shifting suffusions of cosmic secrets. In this city, while the sky carried wonders from far away, the sky was more than all the wonders that surrounded it. It was a whole cosmos, stretching upward to meet the realm of the sky as the heavens met the earth. It was a constant experience of awe, mystification, and solemn reverence, mingling with everyday reality and maintaining a great similarity with the ancient world. While the history of earth and sky might tend to be one of loss, of revelation by condemnation or disappointment, of disasters by mistake, the history of the sky is the continual revelation of the astonishing truth of earthly reality in an immensity beyond the measure of existence. There is simply no comparison.
