As I gaze out of my plane window and I watch down, I see the lights of the Chicago night. Cars, skyscrapers, houses — all form these patterns, these constellations, these pictures. Look, isn’t that a mother chasing her laughing child around the house? And aren’t the lights on the coastline against Lake Michigan’s vast empty nothingness somewhat in Lincoln’s likeness, as he stares out into the infinite, contemplating about the future of the nation? Are those blinking lights next to the highway transmitting a message in code? Calling the mothership back to take E.T. home? The lights tell stories probably as fascinating and as vivid as the lives of all the people who form them.

Then I glance up at the sky and am horrified to see not a single star in sight! The brown smoggy emptiness of the sky is rivaled only by the oceanic lake below. But where are the stars? Where is Pegasus, spreading his magnificent wings as he rises to Mount Olympus? Where is Andromeda, waiting by the sea to be ravaged by the great sea monster? And as the plane passes above the clouds, and I still find the heavens empty, it dawns upon me that I had just left them down below. In Chicago. As the sun sets and night falls upon the city, the stars, not satisfied with telling the tale from far above, come down into the city to sing their tales to the dreaming millions. The heavens descend upon the earth — in Chicago. Could there be a greater human achievement?