Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) Read Online Free PDF

of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn. The universe as regular and ordered cosmos or as chaotic proliferation. The universe perhaps finite but countless, unstable within its borders, which discloses other universes within itself. The universe, collection of celestial bodies, nebulas, fine dust, fields of force, intersections of fields, collections of collections . . .

PALOMAR LOOKS AT THE SKY
     
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    Moon in the afternoon
     
    Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt. It is a whitish shadow that surfaces from the intense blue of the sky, charged with solar light; who can assure us that, once again, it will succeed in assuming a form and glow? It is so fragile and pale and slender; only on one side does it begin to assume a distinct outline like the arc of a sickle while the rest is all steeped in azure. It is like a transparent wafer, or a half-dissolved pastille; only here the white circle is not dissolving but condensing, collecting itself at the price of gray-bluish patches and shadows that might belong to the moon’s geography or might be spillings of the sky that still soak the satellite, porous as a sponge.
    In this phase the sky is still something very compact and concrete and you cannot be sure whether it is from its taut, uninterrupted surface that this round and whitish shape is being detached, its consistency only a bit more solid than the clouds’, or whether it is a corrosion of the basic tissue, a rift in the dome, a crevice that opens on to the void behind. The uncertainty is heightened by the irregularity of the figure that on one side is taking shape (where the rays of the setting sun arrive) and on the other lingers in a kind of penumbra. And since the border between the two zones is not sharply defined, the effect is not that of a solid seen in perspective but rather one of those little drawings of the moon on calendars, where a white outline stands within a little dark circle. There would be nothing to object to in this, if it were a moon in the first quarter and not a full, or almost full, moon. This, in fact, is what is being revealed, gradually, as its contrast with the sky becomes stronger and its circumference is being more distinctly outlined, with only a few dents on the eastern edge.
    It must be said that the sky’s blue has veered successively towards periwinkle, towards violet (the sun’s rays have become red), then towards ashen and beige, and each time the whiteness of the moon has received an impulse to emerge more firmly, and, inside it, the more luminous part has gained ground until it now covers the whole disk. It is as if the phases that the moon passes through in a month were covered inside this full or gibbous moon, in the hours between its rising and its setting, with the difference that the round form remains more or less in sight. In the midst of the circle the spots are still there, indeed their chiaroscuro becomes more distinct thanks to the luminosity of the rest, but now there is no doubt that it is the moon that bears them like stains or bruises, and they can no longer be taken for transparences of the sky’s ground, rips in the cloak of a bodiless ghost-moon.
    What remains uncertain, rather, is whether this gain in evidence and (we might as well say it) splendor is due to the slow retreat of the sky, which, as it moves away, sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, or whether, on the contrary, it is the moon that is coming forward, collecting the previously scattered light and depriving the sky of it, concentrating it all in the round mouth of its funnel.
    And, especially, these changes must not make us forget that in the meanwhile the satellite has been shifting in the sky, proceeding westwards and upwards. The moon is the most changeable body in the visible universe, and the most