This is the famed pale blue dot—the pixel seen from space when Voyager turned one last baleful glance toward home before slipping into the cold purgatory of drifting beyond.

Lay in the Carl Sagan voice-over, the Cosmos soundtrack. These sounds, like Catholic hymns or cicada dusk in Pennsylvania, were integral to the shaping of my wandering, self-flagellating, sometimes awestruck, always agnostic mind.

Voyager was built to drift forever, to seek, but to never find. In Star Trek, she is saved by a higher power. An alien race equips the probe with the means to know everything, to swallow worlds in the gullet of her imagination.

Me, a human, burdened either by my reptile brain or the stain of sin, I am left to listen to Pachelbel or Vangelis and experience the tingling simulacrum of insight—that expansive feeling of revelation full fire but lacking, painfully, in details.

This is metaphor of smallness.

Standing on Earth’s edge, I see in the black waters of night the light of a billion worlds. I know enough of science and circumstance to understand I will never reach them. And what remains of my religion are prayers against this darkness.

//On Smallness/5//