I sat out under the stars last night, hoping to witness the meteor shower known as the Pleiades. This is an annual disappointment as mostly when the "shower" is at its peak, the sky is overcast, or it rains or both. Last night the sky was clear and I sat in a garden chair and watched the northern sky, hoping against hope to be entertained.
Meteors are fragments of comets and the like, often no bigger than a grain of sand, that plough into the atmosphere, where friction causes them to burn up in milliseconds. As they burn they show up in the night sky like transient fireflies. If you are not looking at the right place in the firmament, all you perceive is a flash in the corner of they eye. The Pleiades come around every year and have done for centuries.
As I waited, my mind churned over all the usual mess that it contains, but there is something so timeless about the night sky that seems to make everything seem so trivial and unimportant. My own personal universe is by comparison, pathetically uninteresting and insignificant. Nothing that I do or say can ever have any lasting effect, and my passing will go unnoticed and unrecorded, just like the 15 meteors that I saw before boredom set in, and I went to bed. I guess that if I am still here next year, I will once again gaze hopefully.
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