Mark Helprin Quote

She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be. Why was it that in planetarium lectures the telescopic photographs flashed upon the interior of the dome were so familiar—not just to her, but to everyone. Farmers and children, and, once, Paumanuk Indians pausing in their sad race to extinction, had all understood the sharp abstract images, immediately and from the heart. The nebulae, the sweep of galaxies, the centrifugal clusters—nothing more, really, than projected electric light on a plaster ceiling—carried them away in a trance, and the planetarium lecturer need not have said a word. And why was it that certain sounds, frequencies, and repetitious rhythmic patterns suggested stars, floating galaxies, and even the colorful opaque planets orbiting in subdued ellipses? Why were certain pieces of music (pre-Galilean, post-Galilean, it did not matter) harmonically and rhythmically linked to the stars and suggestive of the parallel light that rained upon the earth in illusory radiants bursting apart? She had no explanation for these or a hundred other questions about the same matters.