No need to apologise if my search for meaning in the sky makes no sense to you. If the sky is just a lid to you, and sunset just makes you go ooh aah, you have successfully repressed what I cannot, the question eternity presses upon me: what real difference do role, family, community and culture make in the big picture?

The time frame of science fills me with awe. When I look up at the sky, I know the stars by name, the constellations are vivid images, and time reveals itself in its cyclical guise. But when I consider that my familiarity has taken 67 years to develop, time reveals itself in another way. I count the generations of observers who measured the angular distances between stars, with perhaps only a few years to apply their familiarity, like ants wrestling leaves to the colony. Without their brief but cumulative contributions, we would not know where the Sun was, let alone the exact position of a GPS satellite.

Every increment in knowledge is a new application of what we knew before, and what you knew before was how to repress thoughts of death and get on with life, how to use technology to fill your time and make your family comfortable. However, the essence of knowledge lies in ignorance, in the sense that the essence of a tree lies in quantum processes in its leaves which contain as much atmosphere and nothingness as components of tree.

Knowledge grows towards ignorance; ignorance transcends knowledge. Meaninglessness transcends culture; despair transcends the good. That is why a modernity-hating teenage boy slaughtered a police employee. That is why I look to the sky.

New Moon measured by longitude is at 11:07 in Melbourne. Twelve hours later, it reveals its soul meaning in my sky.