Quote of the Week...from Alan Watts

Things are as they are.  Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.      ---Alan Watts

I've quoted twentieth century English philosopher Alan Watts a number of times on this blog...delving into his thoughts I could almost pick any one out at random to discuss.  This one brought out the common theme of people feeling the need to somehow place "good" or "bad" labels on the things (and people) they encounter in life. I think a lot of it has to do with insecurity and stems from childhood...there seemed to be a lot of this when I was a kid and conversations often got kind of brutal about branding people as good or bad...with much more insulting epithets applied to those in disfavor.  And when I hear grownups shooting off like that, I instantly think that they're being childish and should just cool it with their calumny.  But what grabbed my attention about this quote of Watts, who studied Eastern philosophy and liked to use Zen principles, is its ending, where he said we don't make comparisons between well and badly arranged constellations.  Speak for yourself, dude! One of my chief gripes as a confirmed stargazer from age seven is the often-crappy way that the stars are arranged in constellations...especially in the southern sky.  That's because originally there were much fewer constellations, the ancient, traditional ones based on myths, like Orion, Taurus, Gemini and Hercules for example.  These ones have distinct shapes to them when you connect the stars and can be easily picked out of the sky from the surrounding stars.  Unfortunately, too many of the 88 "official" constellations nowadays are patchwork creations of later astronomers, chiefly Hevelius and Lacaille in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively.  Their contributions tend to be much smaller and dimmer, concentrated on either the empty spaces between the more prominent older constellations or in the southern sky, especially that part too far south to be seen from Europe or the Middle East. I have a monthly feature of this blog called "Constellation of the Month"...I tell you the truth, I'm running out of interesting constellations to discuss and most likely will be picking a thoroughly obscure one to discuss for this month of September.  But then again, I always regarded this blog project of mine as primarily an exercise in disciplined writing...time to get the heavy discipline going...