You learn more from the sky if you study it as a poet than as a scientist.
(That’s a sentence that just kind of “sound good”, but I mean it very seriously. I chose an extra astronomy class in school as if it would bring me deeper into the mystery of open space, but most of the lectures were spent memorizing complicated mathematical formulas that described the distance between stars, and I got answers in amount of light years, but it wasn’t really what I was searching for.
I was thinking about it lately, because I was looking through the Narnia books and read this:
“In our world a star is just a big ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
And I was thinking that stars can feel so non-romantic when we’ve learned their chemichal/biological components. But on the other hand we know that people are mainly made out of simple H2O, and that doesn’t seem to take the magic out of us. We know that we’re more than what we’re made of. Maybe it’s the same with the things in nature that science seems to have taken the mystery out of.)
I guess because it’s what poetry does, it doesn’t try to erase the mystery, it tries to carry you deeper into it.
The word “smultronställe” in Swedish means a little hidden away place where you can find wild strawberries growing. It’s also used as an expression for something good, maybe like a corner of a dvd store with movies that are good but possible underrated, or a specific destination that you’ve found for yourself and enjoy going to. I think of it like a place in the sun, like a place of unexpected sweetness that is a bit separated from the rest of your life.
eirians 