Because I should give credit where credit is due...
...What they saw was part of a disk four times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth; and it seemed even bigger because of the Moon's foreshortened horizon. It was not the full Earth so familiar from pictures, but a waning crescent, streaked with cloud swirls and burning with a fierce blue-green radiance -- a light with depth, like the fire held in the heart of an opal. That light banished the idea the blue and green were "cool" colors; one could have warmed one's hands at that crescent. The blackness to which it shaded was ever so faintly touched with silver -- a disk more hinted at than seen; the new Earth in the old Earth's arms.
"There'll be a time," Nita said softly, "when anytime someone's elected to a public office -- before they let them start work -- they'll bring whoever was elected up here and just make them look at that until they get what it means..."
~from Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane
I highly recommend the author to anyone who likes fantasy or science fiction at all; her books are a true delight, her prose descriptive yet real. She is the author of my all-time favorite book.
The above excerpt is from the second book in her Young Wizards series, one of my favorites. That passage in particular is one that inspired the last paragraph of the "essay" I wrote below (in my previous post), and I felt she deserved crediting for such a remarkable concept.
EARTH FIRST