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Stone walls may not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, but even old Lovelace, who seems to have been able to conjure up a view for a room without any pleasant prospects, would have been hard-pressed to imagine acrobatic angels cavorting among the clouds if he'd been shut in the dungeon of murk that closed in over Beijing recently.
That's because he'd have found it hard to recall what the sky looked like after a day or two.
You could almost hear millions of people exhale a collective sigh of relief when the wind started to spoon the soup away.
That night, toward the witching hour, the sky was clear; deeper and deeper shades of shadows in which the half-moon was a bright boat floating in the dark shallows of space.
Looking out into the star-marked depths beyond brought the giddy awareness that the city was hanging in space, and the feeling that you could take a wander through the galaxy simply by raising your heels and letting yourself drift away from Earth.
So, of course, that's what I did. Following the stars in their circular course, so my feet no longer touched the earth.
I began in the east where the great dog barked and then rode the giant's shoulder to where the bull raised its horns in defiance at the twins continuing their rustling of cattle.
I would have liked to have wandered further to the end of the Winter Way and let my idle mind venture to stars beyond our galaxy, but eventually the cold forced me inside.
Most of the star-like objects we can see in the sky are in our own rather average spiral galaxy. Average that is, unless complex life is unique to the Earth, of course, in which case it's a cosmic curiosity show and as such rather special, certainly for us (although we seem to be doing our best to disregard that fact).
However, probability suggests that isn't the case, since it seems there are at least a few more galaxies out there. Back-of-the-envelope sort of estimates suggest there are more than 170 billion galaxies in the part of the universe we are able to see, some of them home to more than 100 trillion stars. And since there's also a lot of universe we can't see apparently, as well as the possibility that our universe might be just one of many, by any count there are quite a lot of stars about.
Also a lot of planets, some of which are likely to exist in the "Goldilocks zone" and thus favorable to supporting life as we know it.
All of which, gives plenty of room for the imagination to play in. Which is good, because the smog is back again, with more forecast for later this month, and that means we won't be seeing the sky for a while.
Contact the writer at hannayrichards@chinadaily.com.cn
