to the book that proved such a soporific last night, the torus has a rhythm of appearance and disappearance over the aeons, like one of those comets whose elliptical orbits swing far out into interstellar space and by the old Newtonian laws predictably return to our sky. To generations its presence is evident and the source of omens, miracles, admonitions, and reassurances. People live by its wan light, sing its praises while they work, construe even their humblest bodily functions and pangs of pleasure and contrition as parts of a pattern the torus by its ideality establishes. Then it gradually dims, succumbing to mockery and disproof. The generations grow bored with repeating the pieties of their fathers; a cry for human freedom and self-expression rises against the skyey wedding ring, which has come to seem a shackle, or the lid of an oubliette. The chants, perhaps, drive it away. Since it never touches the planet with more than a sense, in certain transits, of global well-being, it can be ignored so thoroughly as to be practically nonexistent.
The altars are slighted; the temples fall into mossy ruin. And yet an air of irresolution hangs in the emptiness. Public disorder increases. Telephone booths are vandalized; graffiti cover every stone surface consecrated to beauty and visual harmony. Children acquire guns and shoot each other as casually as images are flicked away on television; adults drown their disquiet and despair in alcohol. The world by itself is not enough; there must be another, to give this one meaning. And blood sacrifices are initiated by the tyrants who come to power in the resistless confusions and lassitude: giant drums and smoke pots call out to the red-streaked sky; drugged adolescents, chosen for their physical perfection, have their hearts cut out of their heaving chests by hooded priests wielding sea-green obsidian knives.
Eventually, in its own time, the torus reappears. Personal sanity and public decency are restored, but always with seeds, smaller and darker than mouse turds, of discontent and resentment sealed within the social order. The new cycle has begun. Those cycles occupy far more time than was at first thought: millions of years, rather than thousands Time grinds the ruins of one epoch, its imperishable monuments, into a fine sand that seems an utter desert to the forebears of the next epoch as they emerge, hand in hand, their nakedness clothed in leaves, out of Eden. And always overhead, silently clamorous, imperiously silver and pure, the stars rotate and ever so minutely shift, forming new constellations, new arrangements in the sprawl of eventually dying sparks on the velvet display-cloth of space. The sea through the thinning trees wrinkles in red filaments that threadily reflect the bloated, never-setting sun.
Walking back up the driveway, the Globe in hand, I glance to my left at the sourwood tree that Gloria planted ten years ago and am struck, hard, by its seasonal beauty—long oval leaves, deeply creased like peach-tree leaves, overlaid one upon the other in the lower branches to form a screen of crisscrossing scarlets and browns and freckled yellows and pinks and greens. Gloria has gone, yes, sour on this tree—it grew too eagerly for her taste, between the pears and the lilacs. It quickly towered over them, and heavy snows broke off its overextended branches, which then sprouted an awkward spray of secondary shoots. She even talks of cutting it down, after ten years of trial. The gardeners of the world are unsentimental about correcting mistakes. Perhaps I have for it a certain fellow-feeling. Uncherished, rarely glanced at, the sourwood is humming to itself a complex chorale of autumn colors and at the same time extending outwards, like so many long-boned feathery hands, its flowers, which are spent flowerets a third of an inch high organized into one-sided fanning racemes. It blooms even as it sheds.
Then, around four this afternoon, when the sun was angled just right, I wandered into the seaward guest room— not the one I sleep in, overlooking the driveway circle—and was stunned by a window uniformly loaded, like a fabric pattern, with sunstruck butter-yellow hickory leaves. A window like an upright case of pure unfettered brightness.
I see now too late that I have not paid the world enough attention—not given it enough credit. The radio, between the weather and the stock report, releases a strain from Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke, a melody that keeps repeating, caressing itself in sheer serene joy, and I think of him and Mozart, dying young and yet each