The Supernova's display is a silent one, its graceful luminosity unencumbered by the chest-rattling report of earthly explosions.  Mann's novel of ideas is similar. Its light shines poetically through text: seen by the eye, but digested within the hermetic confines of the brain, whose own mysterious work transforms it into an observed experience. The novel here is a system showing death in metaphor, silently mimicking the ends that only nature can truly dictate.

To stand under the night sky wondering at the ashen light of stars is to interpret their luminosity at a remove of light-years, and so necessarily, though time as well. Done in solitude and silence, it is a ritual as sacred and romantic as reading. Imagining still-shining but wasted stars is suddenly not so different from the contemplation of literary ends. To read such a text is to examine remains: a cultural autopsy. Like death itself, it is an experience undertaken solemnly and necessarily alone.