by Philip Roth
Till dawn I remained out on the deck, lying on the chaise looking up at the stars. My first year alone in this house I taught myself to identify the planets, the great stars, the star clusters, the configuration of antiquity's great constellations, and with the aid of the stargazer's map tucked up in a corner of the second section of the Sunday New York Times, I charted their journey's wheeling logic. Soon that was all I cared to look at in that thumping loaf of newsprint and pictures. I'd tear out the small double-columned box called "Sky Watch"—that features, above the elucidating text, a circle encompassing the celestial horizon and that pinpoints the constellations' whereabouts at ten P.M. for the coming week—and chuck out the four pounds of everything else. Soon I was chucking out the daily paper as well; soon I had chucked everything with which I no longer wish to contend, everything but what was needed to live on and to work with. I set out to receive all my fullness from what might once have seemed, even to me, not nearly enough and to inhabit passionately only the parts of speech.
If the weather isn't bad and it's a clear night, I spend fifteen or twenty minutes before bedtime out on the deck looking skyward, or, using a flashlight, I pick my way along the dirt road to the open pasture at the peak of my hill, from where I can see, from above the treeline, the whole heavenly inventory, stars unfurled in every direction, and, just this week, the planets Jupiter in the east and Mars in the west. It is beyond belief and also a fact, a plain and indisputable fact: that we are born, that this is here. I can think of worse ways to end my day.
On the night Murray left I recalled how, as a small child, I'd been told—as a small child unable to sleep because his grandfather had died and he insisted on understanding where the dead man had gone—that Grandpa had been turned into a star. My mother took me out of bed and down into the driveway beside the house and together we looked straight up at the night sky while she explained that one of those stars was my grandfather. Another was my grandmother, and so on. What happens when people die, my mother explained, is that they go up to the sky and live on forever as gleaming stars. I searched the sky and said, "Is he that one?" and she said yes, and we went back inside and I fell asleep.
That explanation made sense then and, of all things, it made sense again on the night when, wide awake from the stimulus of all that narrative engorgement, I lay out of doors till dawn, thinking that Ira was dead, that Eve was dead, that with the exception perhaps of Sylphid off in her villa on the French Riviera, a rich old woman of seventy-two, all the people with a role in Murray's account of the Iron Man's unmaking were now no longer impaled on their moment but dead and free of the traps set for them by their era. Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. There are no longer mistakes for Eve or Ira to make. There is no betrayal. There is no idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience nor its absence. There are no mothers and daughters, no fathers and stepfathers. There are no actors. There is no class struggle. There is no discrimination or lynching or lim Crow, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice. There are no utopias. There are no shovels. Contrary to the folklore, except for the constellation Lyra—which happened to perch high in the eastern sky a little west of the Milky Way and southeast of the two Dippers—there are no harps. There is just the furnace of Ira and the furnace of Eve burning at twenty million degrees. There is the furnace of novelist Katrina Van Tassel Grant, the furnace of Congressman Bryden Grant, the furnace of taxidermist Horace Bixton, and of miner Tommy Minarek, and of flutist Pamela Solomon, and of Estonian masseuse Helgi Pärn, and of lab technician Doris Ringold, and of Doris's uncle-loving daughter, Lorraine. There is the furnace of Karl Marx and of Joseph Stalin and of Leon Trotsky and of Paul Robeson and of Johnny O'Day. There is the furnace of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain on a night as splendidly clear as that night Murray left me for good—for the very best of loyal brothers, the ace of English teachers, died in Phoenix two months later—is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand.
The stars are indispensable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After many years of teaching comparative literature—mostly at the University of Pennsylvania—Philip Roth retired from teaching as Distinguished Professor of Literature at New York's Hunter College in 1992. Until 1989, he was General Editor of the Penguin book series "Writers from the Other Europe," which he inaugurated in 1974 and which introduced the work of Bruno Schulz and Milan Kundera to an American audience. His lengthy interviews with foreign writers—among them Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, and Aharon Appelfeld—have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933 and has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York. He resides now in Connecticut.
His books have received numerous prizes, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His most recent book, American Pastoral, received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Since 1970 he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I Married a Communist is his twenty-third book.