I decided last year to buy a telescope. I have always wanted one, for reasons I could not articulate. I got the catalogue out and started to look at all the varieties. Some are quite basic; at the other extreme is one that will somehow magically find Saturn if you tell it that you burn to see the rings. In between are various models of various powers. For a few hundred dollars you can glimpse the moons of Pluto.
I told my wife of my interest. She blessed the whole business with the benediction that if I wanted it that much, I should buy it.
This sky business has been getting to me recently. I took my kids to New Mexico on a business trip that we combined with a little vacation. I wanted them to see some of the places that had stayed in my memory from my trips there as a boy. The most remarkable memory I had was of the night sky. I repeatedly told them how we would stand out in the desert, far from city lights, and peer into eternity lit by a billion bright stars in an array they had never experienced in the valley of suburbia where we live, where the stars are trapped in a narrow expanse of sky hemmed in by hills and trees, faded out by the lights of the city.
Somehow we never did gaze up at the night heavens together. The night we were driving through the desert, the kids fell asleep in the car and I didn't have the heart to wake them, perhaps fearing that they would discredit my treasure with a display of nonchalance.
In my dealings with others in this world, in matters sublime and mundane, I am increasingly struck that there is something in us that prepares us for eternal existence. I'm not talking about heaven here. I mean that at some level we all think we are going to live forever. George Burns is almost 100 and planning his performance schedule in Las Vegas for years to come. People uniformly look at death as an avoidable accident. If you take the right vitamins, do the right exercise, see the right doctor, "visualize" a healthy life, you should live until . . .
There is certainly a big part of me that feels the same way. When I was 20, I thought life had a beginning when you prepared for something, a big middle when you got it, and an end when you savored it. Real life is much less predictable -- it's just full of beginnings and endings all over the place, with seemingly little time or reason for savoring. As I get older, I keep thinking I need a lot more time to work it all out.
I recently acquired the habit of reading the death notices in our local paper, and I notice that a number of the decedents are about my age, 46. No alarm is expressed by the editor, no "suddenly" or "unexpectedly" modifies the notice of death as it does those related to younger victims. The obituary page editor, at least, is in touch with reality.
I like to think of myself as just barely middle-age, but a friend recently challenged that conclusion by asking how many people I knew who were 92. If I am middle-age, what am I in the middle of?
All of this makes me think of heaven, and I suspect it has something to do with my interest in the heavens. If we really believe in eternal reward, why are we so anxious to avoid even the notion of reaping it? I suspect that the plain answer is, we don't believe in heaven. For us baby boomers at least, the world is not the pre-Vatican-II world of certain dogma decked out in a veil of mysticism. The angel fad of the '90s hasn't hit most of us. The mystery of even such earthbound things as personality and character are only stains on the DNA chain. The choir of saints just doesn't sing to us anymore.
I didn't buy the telescope. I started wondering what it was that I hoped to see. I figured out that I would be able to identify only a handful of objects, and the rest would be just a smear of light. I was hoping for stars.