Astronomers always work in the past; because light takes time to move from one place to another, they see things as they were, not as they are. – Neale E. Howard, The Telescope Handbook and Star Atlas, 1967

We envy others, for we see their lives in broad outline, while forced to live ours in every detail. – Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

No man sees far; the most see no farther than their noses. – Thomas Carlyle, “Count Cagliostro,” 1833

Vision may sometimes sleep in the sun, while it wakens to widest revelation in utter darkness. Thus I am rapt in a trance-like acceptance of opening cavernous depths, crypts of decyphered gloom, yielding hollows of velvet obscurity that go down, down to the roots of things. – Virginia Garland, “The Rain,” Out West: A Magazine of the Old Pacific and the Ne