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This work was written in response to a story about a young, undocumented squash player who took on all the challenges in an elitist sport. She had a coach who inspired her to keep trying, and in the end, she became an international athlete.

For me, inspiration comes from my childhood. Ever since I was stargazing in the clear sky of my village, Takaatz, in northern Algeria, I was in awe of the silent twinkling stars, and I understood that I wanted to study physics.

I remember that, in my childhood, I tried to turn down some public lighting near our house just to see the stars, as the lights were disturbing the clear sky. When the few public lights in the village lost power, I was so happy to look at the stars and the heavens from our village, which was built on the crest of a hill in an open valley surrounded by mountains.

In 1997, I really enjoyed the view of the comet Hale-Bopp. I was 12 years old, and it gave me thrills. Sometimes I would awaken late at night to see the diurnal motion caused by the rotation of the Earth around its axis, draw my own constellations, and compare them to the known ones in the astronomical tables of constellations.

My father would ask me what I was doing in the middle of the night. He was astonished and asked me, “Hamza, are you okay?” I told him I was looking for stars, and he would smile. Reassured, he would return to sleep.

This desire in me increased when I discovered physics in my first year of university in Bejaia. I used to go to connect to the Internet some afternoons on the university campus because my research was centered on astronomy and NASA. I have always reached out to different professors of physics and astronomy, especially in the United States, for answers. Some responded; others didn’t.

I had the chance to get to know a professor from Indiana University who became my tutor, and he always kept in touch with me and answered my questions, even though my English was not very good at that time.

In 2008, he sent me a book, The Cosmic Perspective. I was jumping for joy when I received it. Every chapter in this book begins with a quote. I have found one from The Little Prince, by the famous French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which was very compatible with my way of thinking: We can enjoy science as an abstract thing, but also as something that has a soul and a purpose, like poetry in motion, something that brings us new perspectives, a new view far from human smallness and stupidity.

Inspiration is a question of curiosity and personality. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes: All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people.

For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems . . . But all these stars are silent. You, you alone will have stars as no one else has them.

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Hamza Benbellout was born in Algeria. His first language is Kabyle, his second language is Arabic, and his third language is French. He came to the U.S. in 2018. At the Andrew Romay New Immigrant Center of the English-Speaking Union, he studies with Elaine Sohn. Karl Hart is the program officer.