In 1608 a couple of Dutch guys, Jacob Metius and Hans Lippershey, invented the first telescope. Galileo improved it and some sixty years later Isaac Newton, as we might have expected, invented the reflecting telescope. And just recently a group of astronomers built a large array and photographed the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, discovering, to their shocked surprise, that the black hole was filled with stars. They did not explain how the light from the stars inside the black hole escaped over the event horizon, but perhaps that is why they were shocked. In my novel Almost Paradise, each galaxy in our universe has a black hole at its center, and each black hole contains a universe whose every galaxy contains a black hole at its center that contains a universe whose every galaxy contains a black hole that contains a universe, and so on, resulting in an infinite universe, all of it contained inside a notional sphere of energy the size of an electron.. Time is an illusion, but the calendar never lies, and non-illusional time grows short, so I thought I would speak of the infinite universe as I have experience it.

I do not know when first I saw a tree
But when a boy, a maple tree at hand
Became the very first tree that I climbed
So high I held the world at my command
So high, so rarefied the air, so still
I sensed that giant eagles soared nearby
I heard the whispered wind upon their wings
And saw their faces clear against the sky
They circled close and beckoned me to come
So close their wing tips softly brushed my face
I laughed as suddenly I understood
They smiled and gestured, urging me to race
I spread my arms and joined them at their play
As in the biting wind great bronze bells rang
We soared as one, in unison we climbed
While in my soul a golden angel sang
A song whose words told of a wondrous world
That lay below in dancing, shimmered light
With tiny houses anchored to the ground
All spread before me from my leafy height
Eight decades have long passed and sped away
Yet still I hear the eagles’ screaming cries
And in my mind’s eye still I see that tree
For time is telescoped but never dies
The universe is infinite in scale
What passes by our eyes is all we see
Yet what is hidden may be best of all
Like eagles and a magic maple tree