Friday, February 12, 2010

Prince Andrey's Sky


I'm reading War and Peace and what started as some truly obnoxious exhibition in erudition (for a definition of the previously used term, one need look no further than the sentence in which it is included) has become a really exciting read.

There's a reason
that
this book is famous

One of the main characters continues to have these epiphanies after doing nothing more than looking at the sky. I'm not done yet and I have to imagine that Tolstoy is going to keep coming back to this idea but he has only done it twice so far.

I guess for me, the individual revelations that the
character experiences aren't that important but I'm really interested in the way that the sky can change someone.

This infinite umbrella that never leaves us can go from the most inconsequential, and unimportant piece of our lives and then, the minute we remember it, it somehow becomes the most profound thing we have ever encountered.


Whether is it hiding behind the roof of a market in Jerusalem.


Or it's riding along with us to where ever it is that we are going. This same sky forces us outside of ourselves and demands that we consider things beyond our own concerns. It's a trite consideration but that same infinite sky sustains us and shrinks us.

Gives us life.
and more importantly,
Perspective.

Plus, it's February in Michigan. Most of us have forgotten that the sky even exists at this point so I figured some pictures would be pretty helpful.