Caption
By investigating the lights in the sky man is trying to look back as far as the Big Bang itself. Compared to this incredible period of time the use of electric light does not cover much of a time-span. Mankind is also just a little and faint twinkle in this omnipresence of history that reaches far beyond any human existence.
Even the mountains of the Inn Valley that are made visible indirectly through some sources of artificial light tell of times that are impossible to be imagined by the human mind. Gradually man has taken over a basically non-human domain and reinterpreted every form of existence according to his understanding and capacity: So the lights visible in the nightly sky became stars of constellations that were interpreted as being related to incidents on planet Earth. The ancient Greeks in a concept known as "
katasterismos" (καταστερισμός) for example thought of heroes (e.g., Hercules) being transformed into star constellations as a sign and evidence of their god-like nature. The bitter or possibly relieving truth for mankind however is that we are "neither hard enough to last, nor expressed in one of those imperishable fires ..." (from a poem by Archie Randolph Ammons)