Mono no aware windows#

All the neighbors were standing outside their houses with their bags as well, and we greeted each other politely under the summer stars. The sun had not yet risen when Mom and Dad and I made our way outside. Dad gave this to me when I was five, and the times we played were my favorite hours of the day. But I like looking through the cameras mounted on the bottom of the ship so that I can gaze at this view of the receding, reddish glow of our sun, our past. Most people don’t care, having grown bored of seeing the stars long ago.

Mono no aware windows#

There are no windows in the habitat module, no casual view of the stars streaming past. With luck, my great-great-great-I calculated how many “greats” I needed once, but I don’t remember now-grandchildren will see it. The Hopeful will get there in about three hundred years, more or less.

You can’t see it now because it is behind the canopy of the solar sail. Our trajectory takes us toward a star called 61 Virginis. The acceleration pins all of us against the decks, gives everything weight. The light from the sun pushes against the sail, propelling us on an ever widening, ever accelerating, spiraling orbit away from it. At the end of the cable hangs the heart of the Hopeful, the habitat module, a five-hundred-meter-tall cylinder into which all the 1,021 inhabitants of the world are packed. It literally blocks out the sky.īeneath it dangles a long cable of carbon nanotubes a hundred kilometers long: strong, light, and flexible.

A hundred times thinner than rice paper, the spinning disc fans out a thousand kilometers into space like a giant kite intent on catching every passing photon. Even that distorted kanji can only give you a hint of its vast size. Yet for present purposes, this badly drawn character will do. My formal schooling back in Japan ceased when I was only eight. Indeed, I can barely write many of them anymore.

My father would be greatly ashamed at the childish way I still form my characters. The world is shaped like the kanji for umbrella, only written so poorly, like my handwriting, that all the parts are out of proportion.