novel

You said my name and my heart went rogue

He's made me believe I'm worth love of the liquid kind, you know, the kind that seeps to all my damaged parts.

But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.

I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.

The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer__ gasp.

Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one__ place in the order of things.

He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye__ discernment of light and shadow is most acute.

The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude__ach convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves__nd she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.

She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.

Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.

The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.

Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn__ in vain, he was able to justify his presence.

Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again."I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you."I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other.

Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy__ interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life__ meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave.

Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.