Mon luth constellé

I love living on the fourth floor. Nancy is a small city, so downtown buildings are not very tall. I have these big windows and quite a wide view of the city -- roofs of old downtown houses, a couple of buidlings, the trees of the Pépinière park, the basilique St Epvre, the tall Park Inn railway station hotel, the stadium spotlights. These are on, so I know there's a football/soccer match tonight. The lights inside the bell tower of the basilique are still on so I know it's not past midnight.

The one thing I hate about living in a city is the sky at night. It's either shades of orange because of the reflection of city lights on clouds, or plain black. The only heavenly bodies you can see are the moon and some of the brightest stars. And a couple of planets, like Venus or Jupiter.

If you haven't already, you must download Stellarium. It's a great (and easy to use and free) planetarium. And very beautiful.

I remember our philosophy teacher in high school telling us about stars. See, latin sidus means "heavenly body, star, constellation", and desiderare (de-siderare) basically means "to stop seeing the star". So, desiring originally means you realize something important (the star) is missing. And he told us how desire is what keeps you alive and moving, that if you have no "star" to look for, you become still, and depressed. And that's a disaster, "a bad star". Consider means "seeing all the stars", which I think was a navigation term, initally. When you see all the stars, you can make the right decision, you know where to go.

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