Camille Flammarion

“ Dark in herself, she burns at a distance like a star, returning to space the light she receives from the Sun. At the distance of our satellite, she shines like an enormous moon, fourteen times larger and more luminous than our gentle Phœbe. Observed from Mercury or Venus, she embellishes the midnight sky with her sparkling purity as Jupiter does for us. Seen from Mars, she is a brilliant morning and evening star, presenting phases similar to those which Mars and Venus show from here. ”

“ Yes, it is the [Pg 91] beneficent rays of the Sun that shed upon our Earth the floods of light and heat to which Life owes its existence and its perpetual propagation.
Hail, vast Sun! a little star in Infinitude, but for us a colossal and portentous luminary. Hail, divine Benefactor! How should we not adore, when we owe him the glow of the warm and cheery days of summer, the gentle caresses by which his rays touch the undulating ears, and gild them with the touch? The Sun sustains our globe in Space, and keeps it within his rays by the mysteriously powerful and delicate cords of attraction. ”

“ Heaven, we reply, is no vault, it is a limitless immensity, inconceivable, unfathomable, that surrounds us on all sides, and in the midst of which our globe is floating. The Heavens are all that exists, all that we see, and all that we do not see: the Earth on which we are, that bears us onward in her rapid flight; the Moon that accompanies us, and sheds her soft beams upon our silent nights; the good Sun to which we owe our existence; the Stars, suns of Infinitude ”

“ It is the Sun that sparkles in the foam of the merry wine; that charms our gaze in those first days of spring, when the home of the human race is adorned with all the charms of verdant and flowering youth. Everywhere we find the Sun; everywhere we recognize his work, extending from the infinitely great to the infinitely little. We bow to his might, and admire his power. When in the sad winter day he disappears behind the snowy eaves, we think his fiery globe will never rise to mitigate the short December days which are alleviated with his languid beams. ”

“ Astronomy, instead of ending with statements of the positions and movements of the stars, is to enable us to penetrate to them, to make us divine, and know, and appreciate their physical constitution, their degree of life and intellectuality in the universal order?
On the Earth, it is Life and Thought that flourish; and it is Life and Thought that we seek again in these starry constellations strewn to Infinitude amid the immeasurable fields of Heaven.
The humble little planet that we inhabit presents itself to us as a brimming cup, overflowing at every outlet. Life is everywhere. ”

“ From the bottom of the seas, from the valleys to the mountains, from the vegetation that carpets the soil, from the mold in the fields and woods, from the air we breathe, arises an immense, prodigious, and perpetual murmur. Listen! it is the great voice of Nature, the sum of all the unknown and mysterious voices that are forever calling to us, from the ocean waves, from the forest winds, from the 300,000 kinds of insects that are redundant everywhere, and make a lively community on the surface of our globe. A drop of water contains thousands of curious and agile creatures. ”

“ This sun by which we live, this succession of months and years, of days and nights, the apparent motions of the heavens, these starry skies, the divine rays of the moon, the whole totality of things, constitutes in some sort the tissue of our existence, and it is indeed extraordinary that the inhabitants of our planet should almost all have lived till now without knowing where they are, without suspecting the marvels of the Universe. ”

“ The azure vault of the firmament crowns the Earth with a dome of dazzling light. The fires of the orb of day shed their beneficent influence generally upon the world.
Yet, see! The radiance diminishes. The luminous disk of the Sun is gradually corroded. Another disk, as black as ink, creeps in front of it, and little by little invades it entirely. The atmosphere takes on a wan, sepulchral hue; astonished nature is hushed in profound silence; an immense veil of sadness spreads over the world. Night comes on suddenly, and the stars shine out in the Heavens. ”

“ What greater delight can be conceived, on a fine spring evening, at the hour when the crescent moon is shining in the West amid the last glimmer of twilight, than the contemplation of that grand and silent spectacle of the stars stepping forth in sequence in the vast Heavens? All sounds of life die out upon the earth, the last notes of the sleepy birds have sunk away, the Angelus of the church hard by has rung the close of day. But if life is arrested around us, we may seek it in the Heavens. ”

“ A heap of stones does not make a house. Quintillions of tons of materials would not represent the Earth or any other world.
Yes, what really exists, what constitutes a complete orb, is the city of Life. Let us recognize that the flower of life flourishes on the surface of our planet, embellishing it with its perfume; that it is just this life that we see and admire,—of which we form part,—and which is the raison d'être of things; that matter floats, and crosses, and crosses back again, in the web of living beings,—and the reality, the goal, is not matter—it is the life matter is employed upon. ”

“ Among the finest and most interesting of the celestial phenomena admired by the Martians, at certain epochs of the year,—now at night when the Sun has plunged into his fiery bed, now in the morning, a little before the aurora,—is a magnificent star of first magnitude, never far removed from the orb of day, which presents to them the same aspects as does Venus to ourselves. ”

“ Yes, our Earth is an orb of the Heavens: the sky is her domain, and our Sun, shining above our heads, and fertilizing our seasons, is as much a star as the pretty sparkling points that scintillate up there, in the far distance, and embellish the calm of our nights [Pg 18] with their brilliancy. All are in the Heavens, you as well as I, for the Earth, in her course through Space, bears us with herself into the depths of Infinitude. ”

“ Without it we should still be penetrated with the naïve error that reduced the entire Universe to our minute globule, making our Humanity the goal of the Creation, and should have no exact notion of the immense reality.
To-day, thanks to the intellectual labor of so many centuries, thanks also to the immortal genius of the men of science who have devoted their lives to searching after Truth—men such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton—the veil of ignorance has been rent, and glimpses of the marvels of creation are perceptible in their splendid truth to the dazzled eye of the thinker. ”

“ Think how inferior are our conditions, since the man of greatest genius, the most exquisite woman, are nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar before its metamorphosis! Would it be a disadvantage to inhabit a world in which we might fly whither we would; a world of scented luxury, full of animated flowers; a world where the winds would be incapable of exciting a tempest, where several suns of different colors—the diamond glowing with the ruby, or the emerald with the sapphire—would burn night and day (azure nights and scarlet days) in the glory of an eternal spring ”

“ CHAPTER I THE CONTEMPLATION OF THE HEAVENS The crimson disk of the Sun has plunged beneath the Ocean. The sea has decked itself with the burning colors of the orb, reflected from the Heavens in a mirror of turquoise and emerald. The rolling waves are gold and silver, and break noisily on a shore already darkened by the disappearance of the celestial luminary.
We gaze regretfully after the star of day, that poured its cheerful rays anon so generously over many who were intoxicated with gaiety and happiness. ”

“ On the other hand, when the Moon arrives immediately within the cone of shadow that the Earth projects behind it, it is her turn to be eclipsed. She no longer receives the rays of the Sun, and this deprivation is the more marked in that she owes all her brilliancy to the light of the orb of day. The Moon's obscurity is complete if she is entirely plunged into the cone of shadow. ”

“ And in all likelihood it is the same for the rest of the universe.
We must cherish no illusions as to the importance of our natal world. It is true that the Earth is not wanting in charm, with its verdant plains enameled in the delicious tones of a robust and varied vegetation, its plants and flowers, its spring-time and its birds, its limpid rivers winding through the meadows, its mountains covered with forests, its vast and profound seas animated with an infinite variety of living creatures. ”

“ Turn to the North—that is, opposite to the point where the sun is to be found at midday. Whatever the season of the year, day of the month, or hour of the night, you will always see, high up in the firmament, seven magnificent stars, arranged in a quadrilateral, followed by a tail, or handle, of three stars. This magnificent constellation never sinks below our horizon. Night and day it watches above us, turning in twenty-four hours round a very famous star that we shall shortly become acquainted with. ”

“ Our globe is no exception in the Universe. As we have seen, it is one of the celestial orbs, nourished, warmed, lighted, quickened by the Sun, which in its turn again is but a star.
[Pg 24]
Innumerable Worlds! We dream of them. Who can say that their unknown inhabitants do not think of us in their turn, and that Space may not be traversed by waves of thought, as it is by the vibrations of light and universal gravitation? May not an immense solidarity, hardly guessed at by our imperfect senses, exist between the Celestial Humanities, our Earth being only a modest planet. ”

“ Attracted by some potent charm toward this dazzling focus, they come inquisitive and ardent, to warm themselves at its furnace. At first pale and feeble, they are born again when the Sun caresses them with his fervid heat. Their motions accelerate, they haste to plunge wholly into the radiant light. At length they burst out luminous and superb, when the day-star penetrates them with his burning splendor, illuminates them with a marvelous radiance, and crowns them with glory. ”

“ In order to examine what is happening on the Earth, let us mount the ladder of time for a moment, to follow the evolutions of Nature.
There was an epoch when the Earth did not exist. Our planet, the future world of our habitation, slept in the bosom of the solar nebula.
At last it came to birth, this cherished Earth, a gaseous, luminous ball, poor reflection of the King of Orbs, its parent. Millions of years rolled by before the condensation and cooling of this new globe were sufficiently transformed to permit life to manifest itself in its most rudimentary aspects. ”

“ And this from all time, for the very stones of which we build our houses are full of fossils so prodigiously multiplied that one gram of such stone will often contain millions of shells, marvels of geometrical perfection. The infinitely little is equal to the infinitely great.
Life appears to us as a fatal law, an imperious force which all obey, as the result and the aim of the association of atoms. This is illustrated for us upon the Earth, our only field of direct observation. We must be blind not to see this spectacle, deaf not to hear its reaching. ”

“ There would be no revolution, no cataclysm. The stars would go on shining in the firmament, just as they do to-day, shedding their divine light over the immensity of the Heavens. Nothing would be changed in the general aspect of the Universe. The Earth is only a modest atom, lost in the innumerable army of the worlds and suns that people the universe.
Every morning the Sun rises in the East, setting fire with his ardent rays to the sky, which is dazzling with his splendor. ”

“ Can there be any one upon the Earth who has not been struck by the phosphorescent lights that glide through the somber night, leaving a brilliant silver or golden track—the luminous, ephemeral trail of a meteor?
Sometimes, when Night has silently spread the immensity of her wings above the weary Earth, a shining speck is seen to detach itself in the shades of evening from the starry vault, shooting lightly through the constellations to lose itself in the infinitude of space. ”

“ Of course this method can only be applied to those double stars of which the distance is known.
It has been discovered that some of the tiny stars that we can hardly see twinkling in the depths of the azure sky are enormous suns, larger and heavier than our own, and millions of times more voluminous than the Earth.
Our planet is only a grain of dust floating in the immensity of Heaven. Yet this atom of infinity is the cradle of an immense creation incessantly renewed, and perpetually transformed by the accumulated centuries. ”

“ Yes, mortals may say that when they are sleeping in the grave, spring and summer will still smile and sing; husband and wife may ask themselves if they will meet again some day, in another sphere; but do we not feel that our destinies can not be terminated here, and that short of absolute and final nonentity for everything, they must be renewed beyond, in that starry Heaven to which every dream has flown instinctively since the first origins of Humanity? ”

“ If we gather a flower, detach a leaf, we everywhere find little insects living a parasitic existence. Swarms of midges fly in the sun, the trees of the wood are peopled with nests, the birds sing, and chase each other at play, the lizards dart away at our approach, we trample down the antheaps and the molehills. Life enwraps us in an inexorable encroachment of which we are at once the heroes and the victims, perpetuating itself to its own detriment, as imposed upon it by an eternal reproduction. ”

“ CHAPTER VII THE COMETS Shooting Stars, Bolides, Uranoliths or Meteoric Stones
What marvels have been reviewed by our dazzled eyes since the outset of these discussions! We first surveyed the magnificent host of stars that people the vast firmament of Heaven; next we admired and wondered at suns very differently constituted from our own; then returning from the depths of space, crossing at a bound the abyss that separates us from these mysterious luminaries, the distant torches of our somber night, terrible suns of infinity, we landed on our own beloved orb, the superb and brilliant day-star. ”

“ How brief a time suffices for all things to change! Serene-fronted Nature, too soon you will forget!... in your metamorphoses ruthlessly snapping the cords that bind our hearts together!
Others will pass where we pass; we have arrived, and others will arrive after us: the thought sketched out by our souls will be pursued by theirs ... and they will not find the solution of it.
For no one here begins or finishes: the worst are as the best of humans; we all awake at the same moment of the dream: we all begin in this world, and end otherwhere. ”