Like a photograph, the diminishing light of the stars is a commemorative sign of what is no longer there. But it is not the only sign of death in the heavens. Blanqui’s skies are nothing but an enormous cemetery for the celestial bodies. From the dying stars whose half-extinguished light seems stitched into the firmament, to the dying sun that turns water into blocks of ice, to the comets that come as phantoms or messengers of death to the corpse of the moon, Blanqui’s universe endlessly unfolds as an eternal work of mourning. It is, in the wording of Jeffrey Mehlman, ‘a vast Trauerspiel’. — Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1997), 37.