On clear nights, I can see the Milky Way stretching across the sky from my drive way. Since the mid-nineteenth century, fewer and fewer have easy sight of the night sky. In Hong Kong, the buildings stretch and loom so high that the streets below are a cavernous indoor mall, a throbbing dystopian under-city.

Hans Blumenberg wonders what this does to the imagination: Night-lighted cities constitute “a secession from one of the most human possibilities: that of disinterested curiosity and pleasure in looking, for which the starry heavens have offered an unsurpassable remoteness that was an everyday reality.”