When I was at summer camp last year, I was a cabin counselor for the fourteen year old girls. Our big surprise for them was a night swim with the boys' cabin. Not being a very confident swimmer, and dealing with a lot of repressed "popular girl" issues, I opted instead to sit on the dock with, well, the awkward girl. She wore sweat pants and Looney Toons tshirts, and cried for days after coming, and left swearing it was he best summer of her life. She was my favorite.
It was a cool, clear night, and I lay on the dock, looking at the stars and listening to the self-conscious, affected laughter of girls who know they are beautiful and are painfully aware of being watched by cute boys, and the accompanying splashes of the water. It was beautiful.
But she refused to look at the stars. She said they terrified her. I had never heard of anyone being afraid of the night sky, but it made immediate sense.
This Annie Dillard essay reminds me of that night.
"I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down. Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms
flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an
hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive
of dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. In
orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merrygo-
round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles an hour along a course
set east of Hercules. Someone has piped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours."
(via Bookslut)
