War & Peace & the Hubble Telescope

This post is somewhat of a mashup.

I finished reading War & Peace on my flight to Chicago. I read it in about two months, which I think is pretty good. If it were not for my Kindle, I could never have read such a big book.

So to commemorate that here is one of my favorite passages from the book. This has nothing at all to do with the plot of the book, or Tolstoy's philosophies on how one should interpret history. It is just a passage that I like.

The stars, as if knowing that no one could see them now, frolicked in the black sky. Now flaring up, now going out, now quivering, they busily whispered among themselves about something joyful. but mysterious.

Tolstoy wrote this almost 150 years ago. Since then we have gained the ability to see the stars in ways the Tolstoy could hardly have imagined. The Hubble Telescope marked 20 years in orbit last April, and we now have images of the stars that would have amazed him. So I am concluding this post with a video of the some of the best images from the Hubble.