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simply wasn't me. It has been praised as proof that I could write "poetically," which gravels me, since I don't want to write poetically: I only want to write clearly. Worst of all, Campbell thoughtlessly mentions Earth in his paragraph. I had carefully refrained from doing so all through the story, since Earth did not exist within the context of the story. Its mention was a serious literary flaw.
Earth, of course, could not exist within the context of the story because if Lagash were aware of Earth, the psychological fear of darkness and the Stars would be irreparably weakened. The entire paragraph is an intrusion, literally, of the "editorial" voice.
A few other rewards for the science-fiction reader emerge from the story, such as the application of the meaning derived from the unique situation of Lagash and its outcome to the situation of Earth: if Lagashians are psychological victims of their environment, how does Earth's environment in a similar way affect us psychologically, religiously? The reader enjoys knowledge greater than that of the characters. Beenay, for instance, speculates about the incredible possibility of the Stars being distant suns, maybe as many as two dozen suns in a universe eight light-years across, and about the question of how simple the law of gravitation would be in a one-sun system. The former speculation makes readers smile at Beenay's naiveté; the latter gives them pause. The law of gravitation was not that simple for humanity Newton came up with his law at a moment in western civilization roughly comparable to that in Lagash's development. Beenay also comments that life would be impossible on a planet with only one sun, since life is fundamentally dependent on light, and that planet would have none half the time. From this the reader realizes the difficulty of imagining an alien existence. Sheerin also praises the torch as a really efficient artificial-light mechanism, providing the reader with more comparative speculation. And Beenay urges the astronomers, just before totality, not to waste time trying to get two Stars at a time in the scope field "one is enough."
The final impact of the story comes from the size of its concept and the image with which the story concludes civilization burning, even the rational astronomers themselves maddened by the sight of the Stars in a pair of passages that are not without their own poetry:
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For this was the Dark the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate him [Theremon]. . . .
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Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened

 
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