Read Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) for Free Online Page B

against the vault of the sky, with all the related actions: putting on and taking off eyeglasses, turning the flashlight on and off, unfolding and folding the large chart, losing and finding again the reference points.
    Since the last time Mr Palomar looked at the stars weeks or months have gone by; the sky is all changed. The Great Bear (it is August) is stretched out, almost lying down, on the crowns of the trees to the north-west; Arcturus plunges towards the outline of the hill, dragging all the kite of the Dipper with him; exactly west is Vega, high and solitary; that star over the sea is Altair and up above is Deneb, which emits a cold ray from its zenith.
    Tonight the sky seems far more crowded than any chart; the schematic patterns prove in reality to be more complicated and less distinct; each cluster could contain that triangle or that broken line you are seeking; and each time you look up at a constellation it seems a bit different to you.
    In identifying a constellation the decisive proof is to see how it answers when you call it. More convincing than the matching of distances and configurations with those marked on the chart is the reply that the luminous dot gives to the name by which it has been called, its promptness in responding to that sound, becoming one with it. For those of us who are ignorant of all mythology, the names of the stars seem incongruous, arbitrary; and yet you could never consider them interchangeable. When the name that Mr Palomar has found is the right one, he realizes it at once, because it gives the star a necessity and an evidence it did not have before; but, on the other hand, if the name is wrong, the star loses it after a few seconds, as if shrugging it off, and you no longer know where it was and who it was.
    Several times Mr Palomar decides that the Berenice’s Hair (a constellation he loves) is this or that luminous swarm in the direction of Serpentarius: but he does not feel again the throb he felt on previous occasions on recognizing that object, so sumptuous and yet so light. Only later does he realize that he cannot find it because in this season Berenice’s Hair cannot be seen.
    To a large extent the sky is streaked with light stripes and patches; in August the Milky Way assumes a dense consistency and you would say it is overflowing its bed; the dark and the light are so mixed that they prevent the effect of perspective of a black abyss against whose empty remoteness the stars stand out, in relief; everything remains on the same plane: glitter and silvery cloud and shadows.
    Is this the exact geometry of the sidereal spaces, which Mr Palomar has so often felt the need to turn to, in order to detach himself from the Earth, that place of superfluous complications and confused approximations? When he finds himself really in the presence of the starred sky, everything seems to escape him. Even that aspect to which he thought himself most sensitive, the smallness of our world compared to the vast distances, does not emerge directly. The firmament is something that is up there, you can see that it exists, but from it you can derive no idea of dimensions or distance.
    If the luminous bodies are filled with uncertainty, the only solution is to entrust oneself to the darkness, to the deserted regions of the sky. What can be more stable than nothingness? And yet we cannot be one hundred per cent sure even of nothingness. Where Palomar sees a clearing in the firmament, a breach, empty and black, he fixes his gaze there, as if projecting himself into it; and then, even there, some brighter grain begins to form, a little patch or dot; but he cannot be sure if they are really there or if he just seems to see them. Perhaps it is a glow like those you see rotating when you keep your eyes shut (the dark sky is like the obverse of the eyelids, furrowed by phosphenes); perhaps it is a glint from his eyeglasses; but it could also be an unknown star surfacing from the most remote depths.
    This