As Many Stars Are In The Sky

Or, Where Inspiration Can Lead

For every Dante’s Peak, there’s also a Volcano.

For every Lost Boys, there’s also a Twilight.

Whether you prefer Pierce Brosnan over Tommy Lee Jones or Corey Haim over Kristen Stewart, one thing I know to be true is that while we can all be inspired by the same things (volcanoes or vampires), we’ll never see them in the exact same way.

And isn’t that the best thing ever?

Stars, They’re Just Like Us

According to astronomers, there are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in our observable universe.¹

And I would guess that those 200 billion trillion stars have been inspiring artists for as long as humans have had the ability to look up.

For some, they see magic. Others see new worlds. And even more see something else entirely. Romance. War. Humor. It’s all there, shining down on us.²

Those same stars have been interpreted in so many different mediums, by so many different artists, with so many different meanings I’m sure it would be impossible to catalog them all.

So, I thought it would be fun to pull together a bunch of art across all mediums, generations, and genres, that was inspired by the same thing and revel in their delightful differences. Each variation is someone’s voice making itself heard.

Enjoy this collection of work, all wildly diverse, all inspired by the stars in our sky.

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Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhône, 1888

“This is one of Van Gogh’s paintings of Arles at night. It was painted on the bank of the Rhône that was only a one or two-minute walk from the Yellow House on the Place Lamartine, which van Gogh was renting at the time. The night sky and the effects of light at night provided the subject for some of van Gogh's more famous paintings, including Café Terrace at Night (painted earlier the same month) and the June, 1889, canvas from Saint-Remy, The Starry Night.”³

Edvard Much ‘s Starry Night , 1922-1924

“Starry Night (Norwegian: Stjernenatt) is an oil-on-canvas painting created by the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch in 1893. This night landscape represents the coastline at Åsgårdstrand, a small beach resort south of Oslo in Norway, where Edvard Munch had spent his summers since the late 1880s. In this painting Munch shows the view from the hotel window where he fell in love for the first time.”⁴

Georgia O’Keefe’s Evening Star, 1917

“The evening star would be high in the sunset sky when it was still broad daylight,” O’Keeffe recalled of her time in Texas. “That evening star fascinated me.” ⁵

Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, 1985

“Carl Sagan's "Contact" is a science fiction novel that tells the story of a scientist, Ellie Arroway, who discovers a signal from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, leading to the exploration of the philosophical and societal implications of making contact with alien life, while also grappling with the conflict between science and religion as she tries to decipher the message received.”⁶

Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, 1981

“The broad narrative of Hitchhiker follows the misadventures of the last surviving man, Arthur Dent, following the demolition of the Earth by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Dent is rescued from Earth's destruction by Ford Prefect—a human-like alien writer for the eccentric, electronic travel guide The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—by hitchhiking onto a passing Vogon spacecraft. Following his rescue, Dent explores the galaxy with Prefect and encounters Trillian, another human who had been taken from Earth (before its destruction) by the self-centred President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox and the depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android.”⁷

Andy Weir’s Hail Mary

“Set in the near future, it centers on school-teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace, who wakes up from a coma afflicted with amnesia. He gradually remembers that he was sent to the Tau Ceti system, 12 light-years from Earth, to find a means of reversing a solar dimming event that could cause the extinction of humanity.”⁸

Sonnet XIV, by William Shakespeare

“As astrologers predict the future from the stars, so the poet reads the future in the “constant stars” of the young man’s eyes, where he sees that if the young man breeds a son, truth and beauty will survive; if not, they die when the young man dies.”⁹

Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;
And yet methinks I have Astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, by John Keats

“Written in 1818 or 1819, the poem is a passionate declaration of undying, constant love. The speaker wants to be “stedfast”—constant and unchanging—like the “bright star” described in the poem's first eight lines.”¹⁰

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The More Loving One, by W. H. Auden

"The More Loving One" is British poet W.H. Auden's wry, complex reflection on the indifference of the universe and the value of love. Gazing at the night sky, the poem's speaker understands that the stars "do not give a damn" about humanity and its feelings. On reflection, however, the speaker feels it's still worthwhile to be "the more loving one" in this unbalanced relationship: the person who loves the stars (or an "indifferen[t]" lover, for that matter) at least gets to experience love, and to make meaning from meaninglessness.”¹¹

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

David Bowie’s Starman

“Speaking about the lyrics to William S. Burroughs for Rolling Stone magazine in 1973, Bowie said:^[11]

"Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes "Starman", which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is traveling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox."¹²

Jiminy Cricket’s When You WIsh Upon A Star

“The song itself is a relatively simple tune, paying homage to the famous idiom where a child makes a wish on the first shooting star that they see at night. In Pinocchio, the song brings to life the story of the wooden toy puppet who dreamed of being a real boy. But the message behind it can relate to just about anyone: “When you wish upon a star/Makes no difference who you are/Anything your heart desires/Will come to you.”¹³

Gustav Holst’s The Planets

“The Planets, Op. 32, is a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1917. In the last movement the orchestra is joined by a wordless female chorus. Each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and its supposed astrological character.”¹⁴

George Lucas’ Star Wars

“Set "a long time ago" in a fictional galaxy ruled by the tyrannical Galactic Empire, the story follows a group of freedom fighters known as the Rebel Alliance, who aim to destroy the Empire's newest weapon, the Death Star.”¹⁵

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

“The film follows the journey of humankind from the dawn of ape-like ancestors to the exploration of space. The film suggests that a mysterious monolith placed on Earth and other planets may have nudged evolution, allowing humans to reach the moon and beyond. The film features HAL 9000, a sentient supercomputer that accompanies astronauts on a mission to Jupiter. HAL's increasingly strange behavior leads to a tense confrontation between man and machine. The film explores the fault in our systems, particularly the use of technology for both evolution and destruction.”¹⁶

Dean Parisot’s Galaxy Quest

“A parody of and homage to science-fiction films and series, especially Star Trek and its fandom, the film depicts the cast of a fictional cult television series, Galaxy Quest, who are drawn into a real interstellar conflict by aliens who think the series is a documentary.”¹⁷

1. According to Google’s A.I. search.

2. I once saw a sad elephant. True story.

3. From WIkipedia

4. From Wikipedia

5. From The Georgia O’Keefe Museum

6. edited from Wikipedia

7. edited from Wikipedia

8. From Wikipeda

9. From Folger Shakespeare Library

10. From LitCharts

11. From LitCharts

12. From Rolling Stone

13. From UDiscoverMusic

14. From GoogleAI

15. From Wikipedia

16. From Wikipedia

17. From Wikipedia