Nightscape

A horse in a large field miles from city lights on a starry cloudless night. The horse sees points of light in the night sky spread out above, and from a short distance we see the horse and sky framed together in a rural tableaux, a country nightscape. We look at the stars but inevitably we see the horse standing in the field as well. We believe that the horse doesn’t wonder at all about the points of light above, we believe that for the horse those lights are probably just there, like everything else in a horse's experience. We think about the stars and planets, or not, as we choose.

I remember reading of an actual ancient people in an ancient valley who interpreted those points of starlight in their legends as being caused by holes in a gigantic blanket hanging from the tops of mountains around them, holes that let in the brilliance of light from the other side where the gods lived. I wonder: Which would be more interesting, to imagine being a horse at night in the middle of a field who sees dots of light in the darkness above, or a man, woman or child in some ancient village who believes that the light of the stars is caused by tiny holes in a very very large piece of cloth hanging overhead?