I felt . . . I felt as a child feels when, taken out beneath the night sky, he is first told that each of those little lights is its own sun, with its own worlds, its own life and history. Vast as our cosmos may be and infinite in depth, next to him it is as nothing, as the meanest puddle is nothing when measured against all the seas of Earth. In all that vastness I was less than nothing, less than a mote of dust, and yet like a mote of dust I was drawn upward, not crushed by the enormity of what I saw so that I—who might have pressed my face to the very stone in awe and reverence—felt that I
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