One thing can hardly come under the Hush Hush — I mean the beautiful planetary conjunction last Tuesday. Did you happen to see the moon (first quarter), Jupiter and Venus, all in a line and not more than three fingers apart? I saw them on a clear evening, emerging from the cloister of New Building to go to dinner, and understood what is at the back of all astrology i.e. the difficulty of believing that anything so splendid is without significance.
C. S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warnie, 18 February 1940. Warnie was serving in the Army, and “the Hush Hush” is the forbidding of sensitive topics by Army censors.
I thought of this passage this morning as I was walking my dog. It was still dark, and Orion stood at the top of the sky, and near the horizon the crescent moon lay on its back with the outline of the whole orb just visible. It’s hard at such a moment not to think that the constellations are indeed “the pattern and the mirror of the acts of earth.”