Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost

“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…”

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife.

On this world, space has produced “atoms with consciousness,” in the lovely phrase of the later poet Richard Feynman. Minds. A world rife with minds, as various as they are numerous.

Elsewhere in his seventeenth-century epic of philosophy in blank verse, Milton...