«I looked at the sky a lot. I like looking up at the sky in
the garden at night. In summer I sometimes come outside at night with my torch
and my planisphere, which is two circles of plastic with a pin through the
middle. And on the bottom is a map of the sky and on top is an aperture which
is an opening shaped in a parabola and you turn it round to see a map of the
sky that you can see on that day of the year form the latitude 51.5º North
which is the latitude that Swindon is on, because the largest bit of the sky is
always on the other side of the earth.
And when
you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and
thousands of light years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist
any more because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are
already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that
makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is
nice to think that they are what is called negligible
which means that they are so small you don’t have to take them into account
when you are calculating something.»
Mark
Haddon
The curious incident of the dog
in the night-time
