Alan Lightman (born November 28, 1948) is an inexhaustible guide to the limits and bounds of our self-knowledge. In Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, he grapples with more personal matters: How do we begin to matter if we are merely stardust?   The problem of existence, according to German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, is that we are trapped in modes of having when we should reorient our natures to simply being. To Lightman's questions of being and meaning, Fromm would argue being refers to experience, and human experience is in principle not describable.

Lightman (whose surname has never been more fitting) slips into a feeling of eternity when he looks at the stars, an expansion of what is possible in the universe and diminution of everything else. Experiencing what poet Mary Oliver called "going upstream" and biologist Rachel Carson, who, also standing on the Maine ground, considered a profound moment of wonder.

Lightman shares this moment of precise consciousness:

I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time - extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die—seemed compressed to a dot.

When does the accumulation of atoms form a being? When do nerve endings start a soul? If matter is condensed to nothing (or expanded to include everything), is there anything else? Lightman seems to ask for himself, us, all humankind, and no one in particular.

Thus, if we relentlessly divide space into smaller and smaller pieces, as did Zeno, searching for the smallest element of reality, once we arrive at the phantasmagoric world of Planck, space no longer has meaning.

As Lightman questions the threshold of life, meaning, and the unknowable divine, he zeros in on boundaries. The beginning of certainty, of knowledge. The limits of the universe, of time, of our materiality, and, most of all, of what exists outside our consciousness, in what novelist Vladimir Nabokov called "eternities of darkness."

There is a human propensity to anchor ourselves in place, in certainties—an island in Maine, in objects we keep around us, and in memories of home. While Lightman acknowledges this humankind habit, he also argues that only when we slip free from our anchors and break the boundaries do we experience the true meaning of life.

Now isn't enough. We want to go beyond the moment. We want to build systems, patterns, and memories connecting moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the infinite.

"How I wanted to be that sky—to hold every flight and fall at once" from poet Ocean Vuong. Astrophotography in Yosemite was taken by professional composer and photographer Andrew Watts.

Imagining and considering eternity this way is akin to extending our consciousness beyond mortal limitations. Of course, death stands in the way. And must be considered. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his unparalleled consideration of mortality, "I don't have a body; I am a body."   Hitchens ended his 2011 book, Mortality, with a line from Lightman's 1992 novel Einstein's Dreams. It essentially concluded that mortality was necessary for humans to come into their own, to exist apart from being someone's son, grandson, or daughter.   
  
Hitchens died before the essay was finished, so whether he intended this to be the last line of his book is unclear. But it was certainly one of his last written thoughts.

For a more profound read on our death awareness, I recommend Robert McCrum's Every Third Thought or the meticulously and compassionately researched The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe, which is about great writers at the end.

"At the violet hour, when the eyes and back turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits, Like a taxi throbbing waiting..." from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Violet sky over America. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

In Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, Lightman doesn't dwell on death as our primary boundary to the infinite as much as these books do, but I think he'd agree that facing our mortality is the core of any search for meaning. Is there any boundary greater than our physicality?

Accompany Lightman's contemporary yet timeless questions with wisdom from the Classical stoics, who believed humans were part of a larger fabric, or verse on the beautiful human continuum as expressed in the luminous contemporary poetry of Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska.   In Mortality, Christopher Hitchens also referenced a poem by Szymborska. Although he didn't name it, he called it the poem about pain and the body being a reservoir of pain. The Meaning and Metaphor of Stars is a collection of those who, like Lightman, have looked to stars for meaning and positioning. These ever-fixed marks of Shakespeare, Einstein, Woolf, Lightman, and anyone who perchance steps outside on a clear night.