little fragments in the icy sky-blue tide. In this instant of illumination all those old photographs and those old conglomerate times Carlyle had insisted upon were revealed to Fred as priceless—treasure, stored up against the winter that had arrived.
Conjunction
Geoffrey Parrish, approaching sixty, had long enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the stars. In childhood, when we assume the world to have been elaborately arrayed for our own benefit, with a virtual eternity allowed for inspection of its many large and mysterious parts, he had taken the stars, like the clouds overhead, for granted. His mother knew the Big Dipper, and Orion, and on a summer evening might point out, in a voice of unaccountable excitement, Venus—a white shining puncture in the blue that was deepening above the gory sunset. For a moment or two at night, he might become aware, as a skater is suddenly aware of the dark water he skims across, of the speckled heavens, a dust of distant worlds, between the massy silhouettes of the black treetops. But in his back yard, where such revelations would find him, he was generally intent upon catching fireflies or feeling the throb of his breath and heartbeat as he ran, late for his bedtime, toward the tall lit windows of the house.
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
, illustrated by Vernon Grant, had been one of the big thin books, smelling like the oilcloth on the kitchen table, that his mother would read to him at bedtime, and somehow it seemed to be taking place among the stars:
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea.…
The image upset him, conveying a seethe of activity that went on without him, all night:
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam.…
Wynken and Blynken turned out to be his, the listener’s, two little eyes, and Nod his little head. It was a hideous thought, like two eggs and a cabbage bouncing around in this glimmering soup, and in merciful escape from the unthinkable he let himself be lulled by his mother’s enclosing voice as it read aloud, in a grave voice sweetened by the approach of the end:
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be
,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea.…
High school and college brought him word of what the stars really were, how senselessly large and distant and numerous, but such intellectual shocks were cushioned by the distractions of co-education—the female bodies with their supple heft, their powdered and perfumed auras, their fuzzy sweaters and silken blouses, and the glimpses, at the edges, of elastic underwear. Why do girls wear skirts, with their strange nether openness and vulnerability, while boys get to wear trousers? And why do girls like to talk so much, and what do they say to each other all the time? Such questions, and courtship, and marriage, eclipsed the stars, which yet seemed to hang waiting for Geoffrey to get to know them. One summer,while renting a seaside place with a long deck, he had purchased a pocket guide to the heavens and (with difficulty, for the blazing points strewn across the black dome overhead made a poor match with the little diagrams picked out by dying flashlight) taught himself the summer triangle of bright stars, Deneb and Altair and Vega, and a few prominent constellations—Andromeda’s flying V, and cruciform Cygnus, and boxy little Lyra, and Cepheus, shaped like a house in a child’s drawing.
In these decipherings—the planks of the deck rough beneath his bare feet, the shingled house alive with lights and the voices of his wife and children talking to one another—Parrish felt united with ancient generations. Man no sooner had attained erect posture than he began to try to unriddle the stars, to name them after gods and animals, and then to construct huge rings and pyramids of stone as if to demonstrate a placatory harmony with the cycles of the heavenly machine. Who was the first man—a
Conjunction
Geoffrey Parrish, approaching sixty, had long enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the stars. In childhood, when we assume the world to have been elaborately arrayed for our own benefit, with a virtual eternity allowed for inspection of its many large and mysterious parts, he had taken the stars, like the clouds overhead, for granted. His mother knew the Big Dipper, and Orion, and on a summer evening might point out, in a voice of unaccountable excitement, Venus—a white shining puncture in the blue that was deepening above the gory sunset. For a moment or two at night, he might become aware, as a skater is suddenly aware of the dark water he skims across, of the speckled heavens, a dust of distant worlds, between the massy silhouettes of the black treetops. But in his back yard, where such revelations would find him, he was generally intent upon catching fireflies or feeling the throb of his breath and heartbeat as he ran, late for his bedtime, toward the tall lit windows of the house.
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
, illustrated by Vernon Grant, had been one of the big thin books, smelling like the oilcloth on the kitchen table, that his mother would read to him at bedtime, and somehow it seemed to be taking place among the stars:
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea.…
The image upset him, conveying a seethe of activity that went on without him, all night:
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam.…
Wynken and Blynken turned out to be his, the listener’s, two little eyes, and Nod his little head. It was a hideous thought, like two eggs and a cabbage bouncing around in this glimmering soup, and in merciful escape from the unthinkable he let himself be lulled by his mother’s enclosing voice as it read aloud, in a grave voice sweetened by the approach of the end:
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be
,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea.…
High school and college brought him word of what the stars really were, how senselessly large and distant and numerous, but such intellectual shocks were cushioned by the distractions of co-education—the female bodies with their supple heft, their powdered and perfumed auras, their fuzzy sweaters and silken blouses, and the glimpses, at the edges, of elastic underwear. Why do girls wear skirts, with their strange nether openness and vulnerability, while boys get to wear trousers? And why do girls like to talk so much, and what do they say to each other all the time? Such questions, and courtship, and marriage, eclipsed the stars, which yet seemed to hang waiting for Geoffrey to get to know them. One summer,while renting a seaside place with a long deck, he had purchased a pocket guide to the heavens and (with difficulty, for the blazing points strewn across the black dome overhead made a poor match with the little diagrams picked out by dying flashlight) taught himself the summer triangle of bright stars, Deneb and Altair and Vega, and a few prominent constellations—Andromeda’s flying V, and cruciform Cygnus, and boxy little Lyra, and Cepheus, shaped like a house in a child’s drawing.
In these decipherings—the planks of the deck rough beneath his bare feet, the shingled house alive with lights and the voices of his wife and children talking to one another—Parrish felt united with ancient generations. Man no sooner had attained erect posture than he began to try to unriddle the stars, to name them after gods and animals, and then to construct huge rings and pyramids of stone as if to demonstrate a placatory harmony with the cycles of the heavenly machine. Who was the first man—a
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