Book Review: Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

by Alan Lightman

I’ve had this on my Goodreads list for a little while. I’m not even sure how it came to be there, but I suspect it was recommended by a friend who is a scientist. Recently my book club decided on the theme of “Celestial” and I started looking through my list. There were three that fit the bill but this one just appealed to me so I downloaded a copy.

The whole book seems to revolve around this thought, presented much later –

I have come to believe that it’s good to waste time. In fact, it’s probably essential to waste time. That’s when the mind has a chance to think about what it wants to think about, without being cudgeled and shoved by the external world.

Lightman is a physicist but a superb writer as well, his powers of observation and description are sublime.

The island in winter is a German opera house in white, with white balconies and balustrades, white carpeted hallways, white winding stairways, white filigreed ceilings. The trees are expensive displays of Steuben glass, each branch lacquered with a transparent sleeve of crystal.

Perhaps, his first book wasn’t quite this good, but his writing style is indeed well suited to explaining the theoretical with concrete examples that beautifully illustrate the science he is trying to explicate.  

The most extraordinary and graphic demonstration of the materiality of the body is the replacement of natural body parts by manufactures and machines. These days, we have artificial hands, artificial legs, artificial lungs, artificial kidneys, artificial hearts.

His musings start out with a transcendent moment of lying back in a boat under a night sky near his summer home on an island in Maine and falling into a reverie that brought him into communion with the night sky and stars.

After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity.

His musings revolve around science and the intersection as well as juxtaposition with the infinite. Scientific discoveries are discussed and how they challenged perceptions of the world at that point in time.

…the world appears to run not on absolutes but on relatives, context change, impermanence, and multiplicity. Nothing is fixed. All is in flux.

He has ways of stating things that subtly alter one’s perception of the event. He talks about his three-year-old granddaughter speaking with him via Facetime – “For her, the fleshy version of me is only Grandfather 1.0.”

I suspect that this is a book that I will read again at least once more, and possibly at different points in life, to ponder. I would definitely recommend it.