Space, the final frontier?
Posted on Monday, February 2, 2015 by
The writings of C.S. Lewis have me in awe anew of space, the mind boggling unknown; yet, within God's domain and known by Him. The heavens, which do declare again and again of the glory of God; we just don't often ponder them. Hopefully these descriptions from Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet will make you stop in the mundane and say "wow" as they did me:
All he remembered of his first meal in the space-ship was the tyranny of heat and light. Both were present in a degree that would have been intolerable on Earth, but each had a new quality. The light was paler than any light of comparable intensity that he had ever seen; it was not pure white but the palest of all imaginable golds, and it cast shadows as sharp as a floodlight. The heat, utterly free from moisture, seemed to knead and stroke the skin like a gigantic masseur: it produced no tendency to drowsiness; rather, intense alacrity.
"I always thought space was dark and cold," [Ransom] remarked vaguely.
"Forgotten the sun?" said Weston contemptuously.
Ransom went on eating like this for some time. Then he began, "If it's like this in early morning," and stopped, warned by the expression on Weston's face. Awe fell upon him: there were no mornings here, no evenings, and no night -- nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries beyond history so many millions of cubic miles. ...
Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens -- the heavens which declared the glory -- (Lewis, 1965, p. 29 & 32)