Italo Calvino once argued that writers had to “set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine.” Artistic vitality becomes possible, Calvino believed, by having “immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.” Exemplary in this regard is Goethe’s 1780 declaration that he planned to write “a novel about the universe.” Isabel Nolan’s “The weakened eye of day” was no doubt conceived in a similar spirit of absurd overambition. Its title adapted from a description of the dimming sun in Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush,” this was an exhibition about the universe—or at least