Everything interesting, festive, fiery, light, clean, and harmonious was way out there, while we, poor fools, dwell at “the lowest point” of the universe, “plunged . . . in unending cold”; the earth was “in fact the ‘offscourings of creation,’ the cosmic dust-bin,”20 “‘the worst and deadest part of the universe,’ ‘the lowest story of the house,’ the point at which all light, heat, and movement descending from the nobler spheres finally died out into darkness, coldness, and passivity.”21 As we have seen, this is what Lewis called our “anthropoperipheral” position in the cosmos, where, from a
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