Cosmos - Carl Sagan (8K × 2K)

Ariadne lay back on the weathered wood of the pier. The book rested on her chest, rising and falling with her breath.

The cosmos knew itself. And it was good. Cosmos - Carl Sagan

She took a deep breath. The air was mostly nitrogen from ancient volcanoes, oxygen from the breath of prehistoric algae, and argon left over from the birth of the Milky Way. She exhaled. Ariadne lay back on the weathered wood of the pier

And then she thought of the final pages of Cosmos , where Sagan wrote about the Voyager spacecraft—how it would sail through the silent dark for billions of years, carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, the sound of a mother kissing her child, and music from a planet that had only just learned to look up. And it was good

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

Somewhere, across the galaxy, photons that had touched her grandfather’s face were still traveling outward at the speed of light. They would never stop. Neither would the carbon from his smile, the calcium from his hands.