An Article

When I founded For Spacious Skies, a sky-awareness program, in 1980, I soon realized that there was no shortage of books dealing with all aspects of the sky, from meteorology and astronomy to aviation and photography. As for evocations of the beauties of the sky, I could read Millet's Renaissance, Thoreau's Journals, or I could scan the 230 plates in the International Cloud Atlas, compiled by the World Meteorological Organization.

Unfortunately, however, most of the literature of the sky is directed towards those who already have an ongoing awareness of the sky's beauty, or those whose vocations require attention to overhead activity. I was looking for literature that might explain how we can live our lives under such a magnificent canopy and yet reduce it to a kind of visual Muzak, so that it hardly registers on our consciousness. I was looking for literature that exhorts us to start looking at the sky as something more than a mere background.

One of my first, and best, finds was a small book called Look At the Sky, by artist-historian Eric Sloane. Sloane had an epiphanic experience of the sky while working as a sign painter in New Mexico:

After his Taos experience in 1925, Sloane registered for courses in meteorology at MIT so he could learn about the sky, much as Leonardo da Vinci had studied physiology to improve his rendering of the human body. Sloane never forgot his Taos epiphany, and we find him writing in Look At the Sky (1961):

I have encountered only one other book that zeroed in on the paradox of our being surrounded by the sky yet unable to describe it the moment our eyes are covered. That book is The Clouds by French meteorologists Roger Clausse and Leopold Facy. Translated by Joan Ferrante, this small Evergreen Book explains the science of clouds in layman terms and concludes by wondering why otherwise sensitive writers fail to "see" the sky. Combing through the writings of the famed diarist Madame de Sevigne, for example., the authors find that her only references to the sky are brief entries such as "'weather delightful" "weather heavenly," "raining hard for several days." Nor do Clausse and Facy find much more description in the works of the nature loving Jean Jacques Rousseau.

So it seems that literary descriptions of the sky serve those who are already aware of the sky; in many cases they are a kind of background "noise" which, like the sky, is not truly absorbed into our experience of living.

Why, then, is the choicest of all aesthetic attractions virtually ignored, although it occupies as much as 90 per cent of our visual frame?

Because it is ubiquitous? Thomas Traherne wrote, "Would one think it possible for a man to delight in Gauderies like a butterfly and neglect the heavens? Did we not daily see it, it would be incredible." In a paper written for delivery at the First Conference on the Sky, held at the Grand Canyon in 1981, Dr. Terry Daniel presented three hypotheses:

1. The sky is not noticed because it is a background for viewing, not an object being viewed.
2. The sky is unnoticed because it is always present and changes only gradually.
3. Sky awareness is low because the sky is no longer a source of important information.

Experiments have shown that the human eye is significantly less sensitive to stimulation from the upper region of the visual field. Maximum visual sensitivity is for stimuli at or below the middle of the field; i.e., directly in front of the eyes and below the horizontal plane. This sensitivity pattern has been attributed to evolution. Humans are upright with eyes on the front of their heads. Food, enemies, and obstacles are for the most part found in front and below. Thus the human visual system evolved with highest sensitivity in this region of the environment. To see the sky clearly the human must tilt his head back and “Look up” — or lie on his back to place the sky in the most sensitive part of the visual field.

What then should a person read in order to gain an awareness of the sky? My own feeling is that reading should follow the sky experience. I doubt if any people have gained an appreciation of classical music merely by taking a music appreciation course. But once the appreciation takes bold, the course has real meaning. The best sky book is the sky. As Thoreau wrote in his Journal:

This article originally appeared in
The Boston Review

This article is copywritten material

Other Articles

"Why the Sky?" by Professor Owen E. Thompson "That's My Sky!" by Cornelia Schwartz "A New Dimension to Learning" by Stephanie Jarvis "A Taste of Sky" by Jann Gallagher "Look to the Sky" by Jack Borden

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