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sharp: he has to lower his eyelids for a moment, let the dazzled pupil find again the precise perception of outlines, colors, shadows, but also let the imagination strip away borrowed garments and renounce its show of bookish learning.
    While it is right for the imagination to come to support weakness of vision, it must be immediate and direct like the gaze that kindles it. What was the first simile that occurred to him and that he dismissed because it was incongruous? He had seen the planet sway with its satellites in line like air-bubbles rising from the gills of a round fish of the depths, luminescent and striped . . .
    The following night Mr Palomar goes out on his terrace again, to see the planets with his naked eye: the great difference is that here he is forced to bear in mind the proportions between the planet, the rest of the firmament scattered in dark space on all sides, and himself, watching: something that does not happen if the relation is between the isolated object-planet focused by the lens and himself-subject, in an illusory face-to-face encounter. At the same time he remembers that detailed image of each planet seen last night, and tries to insert it into that minuscule dot of light that pierces the sky. In this way he hopes that he has truly taken possession of the planet, or at least of as much of a planet as can enter inside an eye.

The contemplation of the stars
     
    When it is a beautiful starry night Mr Palomar says: “I must go and look at the stars.” That is exactly what he says: “I must ,” because he hates waste and believes it is wrong to waste that great quantity of stars that is put at his disposal. He says “I must” also because he has little practical knowledge of how you look at the stars, and this simple action always costs him a certain effort.
    The first problem is to find a place from which his gaze can move freely over the whole dome of the sky without obstacles and without the invasion of electric light: for example a lonely beach on a very low coast.
    Another necessary condition is to bring along an astronomical chart, without which he would not know what he is looking at; but between times he forgets how to orient it and he has first to devote a half-hour to studying it. To decipher the chart in the darkness he must also bring along a flashlight. The frequent checking of sky against chart requires him to turn the light on and off, and in the passages from light to darkness he remains almost blinded and has to readjust his vision every time.
    If Mr Palomar employed a telescope things would be more complicated in some ways and simplified in others; but, for the present, the experience of the sky that interests him is that of the naked eye, like that of ancient navigators and nomad shepherds. Naked eye for him, who is nearsighted, means eyeglasses; and since he has to remove his eyeglasses to study the chart, operations are complicated with this pushing up and lowering of the eyeglasses on his brow and there is a wait of several seconds before his crystalline lenses can focus the real stars or the printed ones. On the chart the names of the stars are written in black on a blue ground, and he has to hold the flashlight against the paper in order to make them out. When he raises his eyes to the sky, he sees it black, scattered with vague glows; only gradually do the stars become fixed, set in precise patterns, and the more he looks, the more stars he sees emerge.
    Furthermore the celestial charts he has to consult are two, or rather four: one, very synthetic, of the sky in that month, which presents separately the southern hemisphere and the northern; and one of the entire firmament, much more detailed, which shows in a long strip the constellations of the whole year for the central part of the sky around the horizon, whereas those of the segment around the Pole Star are included in a separate circular map. In other words, to locate a star involves the checking of various maps