flâneur

Old light

stanforddaily.com · 927 words · saved by 1 readers

Baroudi reflects on the challenge of being truly present with another.

Someone once told me, when I was nine, that some of the stars I was looking at were already dead. The light takes so long to get here, he said, that the star can burn out along the way, and you go on seeing it for years, for centuries, a bright thing in the sky that isn’t there anymore. I remember deciding not to love any particular star, in case it was one of the dead ones, and feeling that I had been let in on the sad mechanics of the universe a little early. This is the kind of fact that feels too poetic to be false, and so you never check. It is mostly false. The stars you can see…

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