A long weekend at a friend’s house, upstate, on a lake, Fourth of July so parties rage on all sides of us, drunk hoots and hollers and “Free Bird” and Led Zeppelin echoing across the waters, intermittent illegal fireworks, but out on the dock it’s dark as pitch and the sky is clear, we stretch out on our backs to look up, we see stars, enough that those of us who grew up in the country and now live in the city feel a sudden stab of nostalgia. This sky with all its stars is a birthright we gave up without knowing it.

Weekends like this used to feel like dreams, like short fantasy interludes that broke up the concrete-steel monotony of our everyday life in the city. But lately the script is flipped, and this—this lake, the lapping of cold water, the staggered streak of the Milky Way, the constellations our ancestors built thousands of years ago (because what’s a constellation but an arbitrary grouping of natural objects into an artificial construct, a Greek or Vedic line drawing that survives to the present day), the clatter of acorns falling from trees onto tin roofs, the raw wood of the dock—all of this feels like reality, like the truth, and the city is the dream. The city is the fantasy. The city is the thing that man dreamed up. The city is the place where even water and trees and the sky are fenced in or tied down or carefully controlled or blocked out altogether.

We can’t even see the stars, in the city. What does that tell you? What does that do to us?

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