O stars,
isn't it from you that the lover's desire for the face
of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight
into her pure features come from the pure constellations?

As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars. (pg 95)

One moment the moon was not there, and then it was, the one bright star. We walked across the desert, hand in hand, saying nothing. (pg 94)

"The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase ou senses. Then--maybe--the eath will touch us. The univese will speak. The stars will whisper." (Stargirl speaking, pg 91)

Look, here are we
On this starry night, staring into space
And I must say
I feel as small as dust lying down here

As noted, Stardust’s leading lady is Yvaine, a star in human form. who has fallen to Earth. The idea of a star in human form is not new. There is even a Marvel character, Cloud, a member of the Defenders in the 1980s, who was an entire nebula who took the form of a teenage girl (and sometimes a teenage boy) on Earth. I dealt with the concept in this column in my discussion of P.L. Travers’ first Mary Poppins book, in which one of the Pleiades appears as a young girl named Maia and even goes Christmas shopping in London (see “Comics in Context” #158).

What I found most intriguing about the Maia episode, and another one in which Mary Poppins hangs paper stars in the sky, is that they imply that in the world of Mary Poppins, science is wrong. Similarly, after meeting Yvaine, Tristran tells her “that he had always supposed stars to be, as Mrs. Cherry had taught them, flaming balls of burning gas many hundreds of miles across, just like the sun only further away” (p. 111). Mary Poppins and Stardust postulate that science is merely illusion, a notion that is appealing although not to be taken seriously. Science tells us that our planet is a miniscule part of a cosmos too vast for us to comprehend, to which we mean nothing. It is a bleak vision of reality. Wouldn’t the universe seem to be more benign if it had a more human scale, if the stars turned out to be people like ourselves, or to be tiny lights that we could reach out and touch just by climbing Mary Poppins’ ladder?

'Trolls can smell the rainbows, trolls can smell the stars,' it whispered, sadly. 'Trolls can smell the dreams you dreamed before you were ever born. Come close to me and I'll eat your life.'

We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.