Rare stories

Rare

Olaf Stapledon

The Heavens Declare

Nothing from The Opening of the Eyes

At his death in 1950 Stapledon left a nearly complete text of fifty-four interlaced meditations addressed to an unnamed "you" - deity or, to use his term, "daimon." The manuscript was edited by his wife Agnes and published in 1954 as The Opening of the Eyes. As in much of his fiction, Stapledon was searching for a spiritual language adequate to the modern world, one that could encompass the newest understandings of physics: the big bang, the expanding universe, entropy. Meditation 32, "The Heavens declare - Nothing," is a response to Psalm 19, which opens: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork." It is one of the most concise statements of Stapledon's agnostic piety, his earnest attempt to yoke science and theology, to reconcile spiritual longing with intellectual skepticism. For Stapledon the night sky replete with countless stars was at once a scene of never-failing beauty and a profound dilemma. It is viewed in this meditation from the prospect of Caldy Hill on the Wirral peninsula, overlooking the town of West Kirby and the Irish Sea. His parents' house stood on Caldy Hill, and he evoked this landscape in his first published book Latter-Day Psalms and most memorably in his greatest, Star Maker. Indeed, The Opening of the Eyes is in many respects similar in mood to Star Maker, though here the dark night of a soul struggling to understand a remote and disturbing spiritual entity is portrayed with greater intimacy and simplicity.

ON THIS MOONLESS and star-brilliant night, I have come out on to the hill yearning to find you, if not in my heart, then in the heavens. But in my heart and mind you are silent, and the constellations are not your features. The heavens declare nothing. The human lights of the town beneath me tell me nothing. Beyond the houses the sea is nothing but a flat darkness.

Overhead a flight of geese, unseen but vocal, momentarily eclipse one star.

To the eye of imagination, the great earth has become visibly a sphere; now great, but now a granule in the huge void. Bright Jupiter lies far afield. The vault of the sky, no longer a pricked black tent, is expanded to be depth beyond depth of empty darkness, with here and there a sun, reduced by distance to a mere punctual star. The Milky Way, that vague over-arching stain, is seen now as a tenuous dust of suns, extending outwards disc-wise, far afield beyond the constellations. The blackness around the pole is deep beyond all sounding, is space boundless; wherein the immense galaxy itself is but a mote, a minute wisp of stars. Within that darkness, for imagination's eye, the swarming galaxies drift like snowflakes; each flake a host of suns, numerous as the sand; each flake the matrix of a million earth-like worlds. The whole unnumbered multitude of the galaxies, so some astronomers say, bursts ever apart, the more remote of them racing away faster than light's own speed; inaccessible, therefore, to vision.

Some surmise that the boundless throng of many million galaxies is finite. Space itself, though boundless, they say, is finite, and mysteriously re-entrant upon itself. Imagination, they say, cannot picture this truth, which mathematics alone, with its exact symbols, can precisely figure. In this view, the galaxies, stars, worlds, and even the very electrons, are numerable. There are just so many of them and no more. Long ago there was a single creative and explosive act, first cause of this expanding universe. Long hence, all the energies of that creation will be dissipated, and death will be universal. By then, perhaps the purpose of the cosmos (if purpose there be, which seems unlikely) will have been achieved; and with the ceasing of all change, time itself will cease.

But others, rejecting this strange boundless finitude, prefer another fantasy, no less unimaginable to man. They declare that between the ever-separating, ever-dying galaxies, a new sparse dust of matter is ever being created, here and there a lonely atom; and that the new matter gathers slowly into nebulae, which mature into galaxies, each with its million earth-like worlds where man-like beings may emerge from brutishness. Thus in the infinite host of the galaxies the worlds are infinitely many. Imagination overstrains and collapses. And for ever, within the interstices and ever-wider-yawning chasms of the ever-dying, ever-infinitely-expanding universe, an infinite sequence of fresh universes is for ever being created, in turn to mature and die. If purpose has indeed determined this strange, this seemingly crazy scheme, it must surely be a purpose infinitely alien to man's desires.

Whichever of the two modern cosmical pictures is the less false to the fads, man's understanding is defeated. Truth slips between the fingers of the exploring mind.

Yet some such picture we must accept.