ripe with shades of meaning, though in the end all that’s left of them is absence.
Why did she need to portray me as she did? For so long I tried not to think of our days in the graveyard the clicking of pebbles in her hands as she sat near the bushes, listening while I read. Even now the details grow faint… I try to forget… banish it all from my mind… though part of me wants only to remember. She was a child of eight sitting by her mother’s grave. I sat behind the bushes with my books. Once we briefly spoke. Mostly I read to her, that’s all. And her stepsister Claire, how strange that she came to me years later, long after I’d been wandering, heading north, far off in the Arctic by then. Why did she need to come to me, or was it I who needed her? And Clerval, that gentle man who everyone thought dead—in fact he traveled east as he’d wanted. Even now I sometimes picture his hand moving in patient transcription as day after day he translated the Dream of the Red Chamber in his house at the foot of Xiangshan Hill, and wrote letters to his friend in Aosta.
Isn’t any voice largely mute and partial, even those that speak openly and plainly (though of course I mostly hide). Why do I leave this? These words absorbed into the garbage dumps, the flames—
NOTES
Notes on the Earth Seen from Space
Over and over the word fragile.
“It looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.” This from James Irwin, crew member of Apollo 15.
Astronaut Loren Acton spoke of seeing it “contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere.”
To Aleksei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the Earth looked “touchingly alone.”
And when Vitali Sevastyanov was asked by ground control what he saw, he replied, “Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small.”
Neil Armstrong said, “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
And Ulf Merbold: “For the first time in my life I saw the horizon line as curved, accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.”
(Is this what frightened you, is this what you sought to combat and to flee? This fragility, this somehow-knowledge even then before anyone had ever left the Earth or seen it from a distance, of how small it is and delicate, as we are too, how finite, how beside-the-point, how fleeting.)
(Might this partly account for my monstrous proportions, as if you were building a shield, a fortress of flesh, as if the vertiginous wings of blood in us could somehow be made to tremble less. But I’m a blunt and narrow piece of materiality. Imprinting and imprinted. As were you. Footprints, strands of broken hair dropped here and there.)
On March 18, 1965, Alexei Leonov exited the main capsule of Voskohod 2 by pushing himself headfirst out of the opening. A sixteen-foot lifeline held him to the ship. If it broke he would drift off forever. Although the spacecraft traveled at great speed, there was no air rushing past to let him feel it. He spun slowly for ten minutes. But when the copilot Belyayev told him to come back he didn’t want to return.
(He didn’t want to return. And yet it seems a lonely thing—that feeling of nothing pushing back.)
Several months later, Edward White walked in space for twenty minutes, though the term is deceptive as the motion is of free fall or floating. Seen from 120 miles away, Earth was nearly featureless. When he returned to the spaceship he had lost five kilograms of body mass, and two kilograms of perspiration had collected in his boots.
But he, too, didn’t want to return to the capsule.
When told to come back to the spacecraft he said, “This is the saddest moment of my life.”
His copilot pulled him back in.
(And you will work in sorrow the fields … As if your laboratory were a field, a wound always to be worked, a rivenness of mind needing to be healed. But when he floated there, in that region without weight or mass or shadow, all fields fell away, all shattering turned soft and pliant, there was