This book recounts the exciting tale of human beings relationship
with the stars. It covers that tale from prehistory and antiquity
to the Middle Ages, going as far as the year 1400 CE, the year of
Geoffrey Chaucers death in England. This volume is not an astronomy
textbook, nor a history of astronomy. It is a book that intends to
explore, or present, the image of the stars that, throughout
history, humanity constructed for itself: the image, that is, as it
was transmitted through literature, the visual arts, and music. In
doing so, it was of course impossible to avoid those frequent and
fruitful moments when the arts encountered science, philosophy, and
religion. Looking Upwards is the result of this constant historical
interweaving. The lodestar for this book was the search for cosmic
poetry, for beauty, and for the sublime for the enthusiasm and the
terror that writers, painters, and composers of all ages and
continents have directed towards the stars. From the dawn of human
civilisation to the end of the fourteenth century, Looking Upwards
traces the human passion for the cosmos in chronological order and
West to East geographic movement from Paleolithic caves to Egyptian
pyramids, in Ur of the Chaldees (from where Abraham came), in
classical Greece and Rome, from medieval Europe to Persia, India,
China and Japan. Domes of Heaven in Constantinople and Ravenna, in
Jerusalem and Granada, star vaults and mosaics, frescoes and stone
engravings appear all over the planet. The music of the spheres
resonates from Pythagoras to Shakespeare, from the songs of Native
Americans to those of the Australian Aborigines. Homers poetry
influences Virgil, Boethius inspires Dante, the Bible and Arabic
literature are reflected in the work of Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol, Omar
Khayyam and Hafez find a new life in Edward Fitzgerald and Goethe,
the Ramayana reverberates in Kalidasa, and Du Fu finds
companionship in Japanese haikus. Looking Upwards is a book of
world literature, because people all over the world can sing, with
the Abenaki of North America: We Are the Stars Who Sing.
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