The Starry Sky Belongs to Children

9,139 characters2007.06.07

During the winter vacation, when I went to Nanbei Lake with my relatives (a dozen or so people), I casually mentioned whether you could see a few more stars here at Nanbei Lake than in Shanghai. At first, Mom, Dad, uncles, and aunts all seemed completely at sea, until I added that nowadays in Shanghai you can hardly see even a few stars at night; then the “adults” were all astonished— in their impression, the night sky still looked full of stars, so many that they were beyond counting. How could there be only the seven or eight stars you can count on your fingers left?

That day happened to be fairly clear as well, so at night I dragged that bunch of adults outside to have a look: indeed, there were a few more stars than in Shanghai, but still only a countable number. The adults were quite emotional. My mother recalled how, when she was little, she would walk while gazing at the stars: the stars and the moon would follow along with a person, when a person moved the stars moved, when a person stopped the stars stopped, wonderfully magical. But no one had noticed that the starry night sky had long since disappeared.

In fact, I too have overlooked many things. For example, when I was little I often used to look for the North Star—when I was a child, I read in books about how to find the North Star by means of the Big Dipper, but by the time I was little, the seven stars of the Big Dipper already seemed not always to be visible. Still, if I knew beforehand where north was, I could always find the North Star directly. In my memory, the North Star was the brighter star in the north, fairly conspicuous (I’ve seen on the internet people say it is the brightest star near the north celestial pole, but in my memory that doesn’t seem to be the case). Yet without realizing it, I had already gone for many years without looking for the North Star again, and was utterly unaware that years ago in Shanghai one could no longer see the North Star.

Even though adults often forget the starry sky, the starry sky must be extremely important for human growth. The starry sky gives people countless inspirations; it brings children fantasy, religious awe, aesthetic delight, breadth of mind, rational inquiry… I believe that the earliest wisdom of human civilization began with those people who raised their heads and gazed at the starry sky.

A child’s growth is a miniature of human history: if the developmental process of the human embryo is a miniature of the entire history of biological evolution from fish to human, then the process from infancy to adulthood can be said to be a miniature of the entire history of human civilization. Infants are not yet attracted by the starry sky; rather, it is in childhood that children are especially moved by it. Thus, in children there is fantasy, there is awe, there is curiosity and thirst for knowledge. But as childhood passes, along with the forgetting of the starry sky, people also forget fantasy, awe, and curiosity. Most people draw their gaze back to the real world, attend to the things around them, attend to the road under their feet; this is also called “maturity.” Only a few people do not forget to look up at the sky; they are very likely poets, artists, believers, or scientists.

The sad thing is that even those who have not forgotten to look up at the sky can no longer find the starry sky.

I remember that some science-fiction writer once imagined such a planet with only daytime—a planet surrounded by seven suns, so that every patch of land was bathed in sunlight, and the people on that planet had never once seen the starry sky. Thus, in their minds there was only a very limited world; the entire universe was just the ground under their feet and those seven suns. Only when, on one accidental occasion, an eclipse happened to block out all the sunlight did people first feel panic, but then they saw the brilliant stars emerging… The science-fiction work ends there; the author leaves the impact that the starry sky will have on those people’s worldview to the reader’s imagination—however you look at it, that impact will be enormous.

Yet what has happened on our planet seems to be just the opposite: an infinite, fantasy-filled night sky is disappearing. To block out the starry sky apparently does not require seven suns; it only requires people to illuminate the ground. So compared with the sudden appearance of the starry sky, how great an impact will the disappearance of the starry sky have on people’s worldview? Apparently not at all. Most people have not even noticed the disappearance of the starry sky. And yet, one can imagine that for a child—if a child’s growth is indeed a miniature of the course of human civilization—would the loss of the starry sky in childhood be equivalent to the situation of the people on that planet who had never seen the starry sky? They would undoubtedly lose far too many things of immense importance—they would from the very beginning be placed in an extremely limited world, and from the very beginning would only look at the ground beneath their feet.

That infinitely vast, fantastical, awe-inspiring starry sky belongs to children. But both the starry sky and childhood are disappearing. This surely is not progress—childhood is a product of civilization, and the disappearance of childhood is also the degeneration of civilization.

Fortunately, things are not so bleak as to be beyond hope; there is still some hope: well… for example, after all, at least we can still see the moon, and Sirius and Venus at certain times are still fairly stubborn; we may still possess a starry sky that “lacks nothing.” For the short term, having one sun, one moon, one fixed star, and one planet each should still be fairly well assured (how miserable…). Of course, more crucially, cities like Shanghai are not that numerous after all, and there are still plenty of places on Earth from which one can see the starry sky (an urban family ought to travel regularly to places where the starry sky is visible, especially if there are children). Finally, I don’t know whether it would be possible to launch such a movement—for example, when Edison’s centennial was commemorated, Washington once shut off all its electric lights to honor him and to let citizens appreciate the importance of electric lights; yet what deserves commemoration more than Edison is the starry sky: we ought even more to initiate citywide blackouts—even if only for a moment—and let the starry sky reappear, giving those children imprisoned in the concrete forest a chance to see the magnificent stars, just like the eclipse on that planet without night, or like the shock I felt when I saw a simulated starry sky in the Ge Zhi Middle School building in fourth grade of primary school; such an experience might affect a child for life!—If at some point I acquire a certain degree of fame or influence, I will certainly advocate this movement: give the starry sky back to the children!

June 7, 2007, 11:25 p.m.