Light is life and darkness is death. So it is assumed, and over and over those associations are conflated. The supernova turns these assumptions over (as astronomical observations tend, historically, to do). From the explosive death of a star comes a light that outshines its life. Death is brighter and life is now, somehow not dark, but dimmer. 

The 20th Century had seen explosions, cataclysms—eruptions of disease and world wars, the likes of which such astronomic appearances were once thought to predict.  Specifically, World Was I strikes a singularly resonant chord. Its origins were physical. A chain reaction of bonds forged and broken. A massive agglomeration of states and individuals became subsumed in a system that resulted in deaths as yet unparalleled in Western history.  Nations and soldiers knuckled-under became powerless against the rules of the system, and submitted to blameless deaths.  Like the star whose very means of sustaining fire during its life accumulates the mass that engenders its end, this war was a gyre that drew in lives fueling destruction. People were caught up, conscripted, their heads spinning in this new forum where modern projects had gone berserk.

 

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Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain begins in an era buried so profoundly by history that it cannot be named. During one mysterious year the International Sanatorium Berghoff receives a visitor. Hans Castorp arrives at the sanatorium an ignorant young man, one of many thousands like him raised in the German flatlands. He comes to visit his cousin Joachim, a sober and grounded man who, in another life, had been a soldier. Joachim rolls his eyes and chastises Hans for his simplicity. The young Hans, with unsophisticated pretentions and a will to learn, is as quick to judge as he is to be swayed. Beauty and ideas turn his head (and do so perhaps too easily). He arrives with the intention of staying two weeks. Time, however, as much a character as it is a phenomenon, has its own agenda. Like the mercury in his thermometer, it melts and seizes up in barely perceptible, but measurable ways. Months pass in fits like the moist, tuberculotic coughs he hears issuing from the patients all around him.  When a gathering storm jolts Hans awake, seven years have passed. Now a man, no longer the simple lowland Jüngling, he has indulged in the luxury of living the life of the mind. He has shed his ordinariness, steeped in enlightenment philosophy and humanism by Settembrini, his charismatic intellectual guru.