The Sun and the Stars

A fantasy.

Imagine you're born lucky. Maybe you're a Roman patrician with a senator for a father, set up in advance for a brilliant career. Or maybe you're the Queen of Egypt with barges lining the Nile and the entire civilized world singing your name. Or maybe you're the product of Zeus himself, born from one of his little indiscretions with the irresistible ladies of the mortal world.

These are ancient images, picturesque, a little stereotyped, sure, but no less evocative for that. If the generous reader wants to supply some modern equivalents I'm sure they'll spring to mind easily enough.

Idioms abound. Born with a silver spoon in one's mouth. Born under a lucky star. Beloved of the gods. Lucky Jack. Fortuna's lover. Soldier of fortune. I paid my own way. Son and heir by ancient right of primogeniture. Can do no wrong. Thrice-kissed of the Blessed One. The subject supposed to enjoy. World is your oyster, laddie.

You get the idea.

Unlimited potential. Unlimited adventure. Unlimited access.

You could conquer the world, if only you reach out your hand and perform the requisite sacrifices.

You?

No, sorry gracious reader, I misspoke. For that too is part of the fantasy. These figures of legend and comic-bookery are never mere mortals like you or me. Bit by a radioactive spider, all of them, or else sired by the gods themselves, or at least born to royalty. Far more access to wealth and power than you or I will ever see, gentle reader.

Our fortunate son is something other than merely human. Gifted with birth, or exceptional talents, or an exceedingly unlikely accident that makes it easy and automatic for them to have their way with Lady Luck.

This is crucial, dearly beloved. You must understand this or there's no point whatsoever in going on, please and thank you. The hero must possess the gift of Fortune naturally, without effort, without any exceptional strain or that nasty hard work that (Lord knows!) you or I could put in if we really, really wanted to. He (or she, naturally) must be as it were utterly unconscious of his own great happiness.

"Of course I'm lucky," we might imagine Captain Kirk saying if pressed. "I also have two arms. Ten fingers. Breathe air with my lungs."

It comes easy to him because he's talented, he's gifted, he's a genius, and he's always good-natured about it. Sure, he's happy and everything always works out for him, but you can't hate him for it. He's something else. There are no comparisons here.

You might hate your neighbor for having a bigger swimming pool than you. You might grind your teeth at a friend who won't shut up about a son (or daughter) who is on track to become Ambassador to Timbuktu someday. You might want to strangle that empty-headed bimbo who gets a smile, a nod, and God only knows what else from the Clark Kent you've been pining away for. But you don't compare yourself to Tony Stark.

(Again, crucial. Absolutely critical. Read it again till it sinks in. My spies will let me know if you try to pull a sneaky on me, love.)

Comparison here would be, as always, the larcenist of mirthfulness. And so our lucky boy is the son of Zeus–and Hera too, at least in the Disney version!

And not only that.

Now we sojourn into matters energetical, beloved reader. For if we do not react with backbiting and envy to our joyous one's joy, well, how shall we react?

How does the climbing Morning Glory react to the warm glow of the sun? By opening its petals and becoming more beautiful.

Do you know the Tarot deck, reader? Think of card number XIX of the Greater Arcana in the Albano-Waite deck.

The Sun.

Shining in the entire upper half of the card, rays issuing from his face at every angle, a placid expression of cosmic contentment riding easily on his features. Sunflowers, five of them, sit atop a wall a little lower down. We remember that–yes!–all life on Earth is but a reaction to The Sun's ever-giving light.

And a little lower down, in the foreground, what do we see? Why, it's our happy boy himself, seated on a white horse and waving a red banner that's much too big for him. A laughing red feather extends skyward from his noggin, and there's a something sunny in his expression.

Such is his joy, gentle reader, that we ourselves become joyful in its light. We want to bask in it. Feel its warmth embrace and absorb us.

A fantasy. But a true fantasy, for all that, and an important one.

I think of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Mann, after all, was a man who knew about such matters and charmed us all so bewitchingly with his Joseph, with his Confessions of Felix Krull.

But those another day. Today I'll speak to you of The Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp, a perfectly ordinary young man, goes to visit his cousin Joachim at a sanatorium high in the Alps. It's meant to be only a three-week visit, but (would you believe it?) young Hans Castorp ends up becoming a patient of the sanatorium and remaining there for seven years.

In his time on the mountain, Hans Castorp learns about the glorious progress of European humanism from Herr Settembrini, while Herr Naphta lets him know European civilization is a cesspool of filth and degradation that ought to be purified with terror for the glory of God. The inconclusive arguments between Settembrini and Naphta are some of the highlights of the novel. But in the end they're only so many words and so much argument.

They're nothing compared to when Hans Castorp finally gets Clavdia Chauchat to give him a copy of her x-ray photograph. So intimate!

Anyway, after Hans Castorp has spent a few good years at the sanatorium he encounters a man who puts both the humanist Settembrini and the anti-humanist Naphta to shame: Mynheer Peeperkorn. Peeperkorn, you see, has personality. While Settembrini and Naphta both have defined intellectual positions and a lot of reasons for their opinions, Peeperkorn dominates simply by being what he is.

Frau Chauchat immediately becomes one of his lovers. He makes grand pronouncements and everyone listens closely as the great man speaks. Sure, he never manages to finish a sentence or form a coherent thought beyond, "Life is a woman, my boy…" but it doesn't much matter.

As I said, matters energetical.

And sure, Peeperkorn kills himself later on, but seeing as the novel ends with the collective suicide of Western civilization in the outbreak of World War One, what does that matter?

The point is, well, you get the point.

Think of The Sun. Thus speaks Zarathustra to the sun:

"You great star! What would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine? For ten years you have come up here to my cave: you would have tired of your light and of this route without me, my eagle and my snake. But we awaited you every morning, took your overflow from you and blessed you for it."

Please don't misunderstand me, attentive reader. I love the Moon. Hidden, mysterious, and variable. Misty, liquid, tidal. Illuminated by the light of the sun.

But the sun has its own virtues. Boundless energy being the chiefest among them. Think of the incredible energies that radiate from the glowing sunball every second. Think of the vanishingly tiny fraction of that energy that reaches the Earth–a physicist could calculate it.

But that miniscule proportion of the sun's energy is every life that has ever been on Earth.

Think on that. Think on that.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

how I wonder what you are.

Up above the world you fly

like a diamond in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

how I wonder what you are.