meridian
For Aster Lit Issue 14: Meridian, we’re interested in the choices, circumstances, and definitions that shape our experiences. Whether interpreting meridian as the lines that cut up our seas and skies, the elusive “prime” of lives, the surreal shadowlessness of midday, or beyond, we’re looking for art and writing that scintillates, that questions, that runs between the ends of the Earth. Keep reading to see ideas and quotes related to meridian!
meridian
noun.
1) midday; literally from Latin for “middle day”
2) a point or period of highest development, greatest prosperity, or the like
3) axes defining the earth
unifying color
Johannes Itten’s Bauhaus “Color Star,” is a reinterpretation of the classic color wheel arranged into a star instead of a circle to better emphasize and map out the dichotomous and contrasting properties of color that were important to Bauhaus design. The wheel has 12 meridians serving to at once partition and unify the polarities in color properties.
becoming halved
Radioactive decay and half-lives: an experience and substance being infinitely halved into exponentially smaller pieces until it becomes something else; no single atom’s moment of decay can be predicted
Zeno's Paradox: to travel from point A to point B, you must first cover half the distance, then half the remaining distance, and so on, resulting in an infinite number of steps—suggesting that motion is impossible, as you'll never complete the infinite number of steps.
the celestial meridian
an imaginary line in the sky that extends from the north point on the horizon, through the north celestial pole, through the zenith, to the south point on the horizon, dividing the sky into an eastern half and a western half.
read the editors’ reflections
What does meridian mean to the Aster Lit team? What images, ideas, and emotions does it invoke? Read our editors’ reflections on the theme here.
submit
Submit to Issue 14 here.
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cartography
Ptolemy’s first projection utilized multiple meridians that converged, showing the then-known world.
Thomas Mann
“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins, it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.”
“Hong Kong Venice” by Fan Ho
Ocean Vuong
“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
Han Kang
“Standing at this border where land and water meet, watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves (though this eternity is in fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish, everything will one day vanish), the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity.”
Virginia Woolf
"Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now."
J.D. Salinger
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
Albert Camus
“We stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop between the sea, the sand, and the sun… It was then that I realized you could either shoot or not shoot.”
“A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery” by Joseph Wright of Derby
Macdonald Carey
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”