by John Carey
There came a July day – around 1910, I suppose – when I felt the urge to explore the vast marshland beyond the Oredezh. After skirting the river for three or four miles, I found a rickety foot-bridge. While crossing over, I could see the huts of a hamlet on my left, apple trees, rows of tawny pine logs lying on a green bank, and the bright patches made on the turf by the scattered clothes of peasant girls, who, stark naked in shallow water, romped and yelled, heeding me as little as if I were the discarnate carrier of my present reminiscences.
On the other side of the river, a dense crowd of small, bright blue male butterflies that had been tippling on the rich, trampled mud and cow dung through which I trudged rose all together into the spangled air and settled again as soon as I had passed.
After making my way through some pine groves and alder scrub I came to the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera around me, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of the morass under my foot, than I knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies, whose pictures, or, still better, nonillustrated descriptions I had worshiped for several seasons. And the next moment I was among them. Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss and mire, over the flower spikes of the fragrant bog orchid (the nochnaya fialka of Russian poets), a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight. Pretty Cordigera, a gem-like moth, buzzed all over its uliginose food plant. I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-marbled Satyrs. Unmindful of the mosquitoes that furred my forearms, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species – vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.
Source: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969.
Discovering a Medieval Louse
John Steinbeck’s interest in science was stimulated by his long friendship with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Even more consuming was his interest in the Arthurian legends. This extract is from a letter written in September 1962.
The Morgan Library has a very fine 11th-century Launcelot in perfect condition. I was going over it one day and turned to the rubric of the first known owner dated 1221, the rubric a squiggle of very thick ink. I put a glass on it and there imbedded deep in the ink was the finest crab louse, pfithira pulus, I ever saw. He was perfectly preserved even to his little claws. I knew I would find him sooner or later because people of that period were deeply troubled with lice and other little beasties – hence the plagues. I called the curator over and showed him my find and he let out a cry of sorrow. ‘I’ve looked at that rubric a thousand times,’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t I have found him?’
Source: Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, London, Heinemann, 1975.
The Gecko’s Belly
Italo Calvino (1923–85) was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was an essayist and journalist as well as a novelist. The following is from Mr Palomar (1983).
On the terrace, the gecko has returned, as he does every summer. An exceptional observation point allows Mr Palomar to see him not from above, as we have always been accustomed to seeing geckos, treefrogs, and lizards, but from below. In the living room of the Palomar home there is a little show-case window and display case that opens on to the terrace; on the shelves of this case a collection of Art Nouveau vases is aligned; in the evening a 75-Watt bulb illuminates the objects; a plumbago plant trails its pale blue flowers from the wall against the outside glass; every evening, as soon as the light is turned on, the gecko, who lives under the leaves on that wall, moves onto the glass, to the spot where the bulb shines, and remains motionless, like a lizard in the sun. Gnats fly around, also attracted by the light; the reptile, when a gnat comes within range, swallows it.
Mr Palomar and Mrs Palomar every evening end up shifting their chairs from the television set to place them near the glass; from the interior of the room they contemplate the whitish form of the reptile against the dark background. The choice between television and gecko is not always made without some hesitation; each of the two spectacles has some information to offer that the other does not provide: the television ranges over continents gathering luminous impulses that describe the visible face of things; the gecko, on the other hand, represents immobile concentration and the hidden side, the obverse of what is displayed to the eye.
The most extraordinary thing are the claws, actual hands with soft fingers, all pad, which, pressed against the glass, adhere to it with their minuscule suckers: the five fingers stretch out like the petals of little flowers in a childish drawing, and when one claw moves, the fingers close like a flower, only to spread out again and flatten against the glass, making tiny streaks, like fingerprints. At once delicate and strong, these hands seem to contain a potential intelligence, so that if they could only be freed from their task of remaining stuck there to the vertical surface they could acquire the talents of human hands, which are said to have become skilled after they no longer had to cling to boughs or press on the ground.
Bent, the legs seem not so much all knee as all elbow, elastic in order to raise the body. The tail adheres to the glass only along a central strip, from which the rings begin that circle it from one side to the other and make of it a sturdy and well-protected implement; most of the time it is listless, idle, and seems to have no talent or ambition beyond subsidiary support (nothing like the calligraphic agility of lizards’ tails); but when called upon, it proves well-articulated, ready to react, even expressive.
Of the head, the vibrant, capacious gullet is visible, and the protruding, lidless eyes at either side. The throat is a limp sack’s surface extending from the tip of the chin, hard and all scales like that of an alligator, to the white belly that, where it presses against the glass, also reveals a grainy, perhaps adhesive, speckling.
When a gnat passes close to the gecko’s throat, the tongue flicks and engulfs, rapid and supple and prehensile, without shape, capable of assuming whatever shape. In any case, Mr Palomar is never sure if he has seen it or not seen it: what he surely does see, now, is the gnat inside the reptile’s gullet: the belly pressed against the illuminated glass is transparent as if under X-rays; you can follow the shadow of the prey in its course through the viscera that absorb it.
If all material were transparent – the ground that supports us, the envelope that sheathes our body – everything would be seen not as a fluttering of impalpable wings but as an inferno of grinding and ingesting. Perhaps at this moment a god of the nether world situated in the center of the earth with his eye that can pierce granite is watching us from below, following the cycle of living and dying, the lacerated victims dissolving in the bellies of their devourers until they, in their turn, are swallowed by another belly.
The gecko remains motionless for hours; with a snap of his tongue he gulps down a mosquito or a gnat every now and then; other insects, on the contrary, identical to the first, light unawares a few millimeters from his mouth and he seems not to perceive them. Is it the vertical pupil of his eyes, separated at the sides of his head, that does not notice? Or does he have criteria of choice and rejection that we do not know? Or are his actions prompted by chance or by whim?
The segmentation of legs and tail into rings, the speckling of tiny granulous plates on his head and belly give the gecko the appearance of a mechanical device; a highly elaborate machine, its every microscopic detail carefully studied, so that you begin to wonder
if all that perfection is not squandered, in view of the limited operations it performs. Or is that perhaps the secret: content to be, does he reduce his doing to the minimum? Can this be his lesson, the opposite of the morality that, in his youth, Mr Palomar wanted to make his: to strive always to do something a bit beyond one’s means?
Now a bewildered nocturnal butterfly comes within range. Will he overlook it? No, he catches this, too. His tongue is transformed into a butterfly net and he pulls it into his mouth. Will it all fit? Will he spit it out? Will he explode? No, the butterfly is there in his throat; it flutters, in a sorry state, but still itself, not touched by the insult of chewing teeth, now it passes the narrow limits of the neck, it is a shadow that begins its slow and troubled journey down along a swollen esophagus.
The gecko, emerging from its impassiveness, gasps, shakes its convulsed throat, staggers on legs and tail, twists its belly, subjected to a severe test. Will this be enough for him, for tonight? Will he go away? Was this the peak of every desire he yearned to satisfy? Was this the nearly impossible test in which he wanted to prove himself? No, he stays. Perhaps he has fallen asleep. What is sleep like for someone who has eyes without eyelids?
Mr Palomar is unable to move from there either. He sits and stares at the gecko. There is no truce on which he can count. Even if he turned the television back on, he would only be extending the contemplation of massacres. The butterfly, fragile Eurydice, sinks slowly into her Hades. A gnat flies, is about to light on the glass. And the gecko’s tongue whips out.
Source: Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar, trans. William Weaver, London, Picador, Pan Books, 1986.
On The Moon
At 3.18 p.m. (Houston time) on 20 July 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong sent back to the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston, Texas, the message ‘The Eagle has landed’, indicating that the lunar module from the Apollo 11 Spacecraft had touched down on the moon, in the area known as the Sea of Tranquillity. Armstrong’s heart rate at touchdown had risen to 156 beats a minute. The landing was the culmination of a 24 billion dollar space programme – money that critics protested should have been spent on reducing world poverty.
Recalling the approach to the moon, Armstrong said:
The most dramatic recollections I had were the sights themselves. Of all the spectacular views we had, the most impressive to me was on the way to the moon, when we flew through the shadow. We were still thousands of miles away, but close enough so that the moon almost filled our circular window. It was eclipsing the sun, from our position, and the corona of the sun was visible around the limb of the moon as a gigantic lens-shaped or saucer-shaped light, stretching out to several lunar diameters. It was magnificent, but the moon was even more so. We were in its shadow, so there was no part of it illuminated by the sun. It was illuminated only by earthshine. It made the moon appear blue-gray, and the entire scene looked decidedly three-dimensional.
I was really aware, visually aware, that the moon was in fact a sphere, not a disc. It seemed almost as if it were showing us its roundness, its similarity in shape to our earth, in a sort of welcome. I was sure that it would be a hospitable host. It had been awaiting its first visitors for a long time.
Before Armstrong stepped onto the moon, his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin celebrated Communion, using a wine chalice given him by the minister of his Presbyterian church. Armstrong found the view out of the lunar module’s window comparable to a night-time scene lighted for photography:
The sky is black, you know. It’s a very dark sky. But it still seemed more like daylight than darkness as we looked out the window. It’s a peculiar thing, but the surface looked very warm and inviting. It looked as if it would be a nice place to take a sunbath. It was the sort of situation in which you felt like going out there in nothing but a swimming suit to get a little sun. From the cockpit, the surface seemed to be tan. It’s hard to account for that, because later when I held this material in my hand, it wasn’t tan at all. It was black, gray and so on. It’s some kind of lighting effect, but out the window the surface looks much more like light desert sand than black sand.
Clambering down the ladder from Eagle’s cabin Armstrong reported:
The L[unar] M[odule] footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches. Although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. Now and then, it’s very fine … I’m going to step off the LM now.
‘I had thought about what I was going to say,’ he later admitted, ‘largely because so many people had asked me to think about it … It wasn’t really decided until after we got onto the lunar surface.’
Stepping off the dish-shaped landing pad onto the moon at 9.56 p.m. (Houston time) he uttered the usually misquoted sentence: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’
On the moon the two astronauts collected rock samples, erected an American flag with a metal strip woven into its top edge so that it would appear to fly despite the windless conditions on the moon’s surface, and talked to President Nixon on the phone. Re-entering the lunar module they left behind a plaque which read: ‘Here Men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all Mankind.’
Back in the module, Armstrong thought it all over:
My impression was that we were taking a snapshot of a steady-state process, in which rocks were being worn down on the surface of the moon with time and other rocks were being thrown out on top as a result of new events somewhere near or far away. In other words, no matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would generally be the same.
Buzz Aldrin found himself wondering how long his footsteps would linger on the moon’s surface:
The moon was a very natural and very pleasant environment in which to work. It had many of the advantages of zero-gravity, but it was in a sense less lonesome than zero G, where you always have to pay attention to securing attachment points to give you some means of leverage. In one-sixth gravity, on the moon, you had a distinct feeling of being somewhere, and you had a constant, though at many times ill defined, sense of direction and force …
As we deployed our experiments on the surface we had to jettison things like lanyards, retaining fasteners, etc., and some of these we tossed away. The objects would go away with a slow, lazy motion. If anyone tried to throw a baseball back and forth in that atmosphere he would have difficulty, at first, acclimatizing himself to that slow, lazy trajectory; but I believe he could adapt to it quite readily.
Odor is very subjective, but to me there was a distinct smell to the lunar material – pungent, like gunpowder or spent cap-pistol caps. We carted a fair amount of lunar dust back inside the vehicle with us, either on our suits and boots or on the conveyor system we used to get boxes and equipment back inside. We did notice the odor right away.
It was a unique, almost mystical environment up there.
Source: First on the Moon. A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., written with Grace Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin, Epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke, Boston and Toronto, Little, Brown, 1970.
Gravity
Gravity is the weakest of the four forces in nature, so weak that only astronomical bodies exert it significantly. The others are the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, which binds together atomic nuclei, and the weak nuclear force, which causes subatomic particles to scatter. For human life to exist on Earth it was essential that gravity should be strong enough to stop the atmosphere being ripped away into space, and weak enough to let us stand up and move around. These are the conditions celebrated in John Frederick Nims’s poem. ‘Klutz’ (in the last stanza) is American slang for a clumsy person.
Mildest of all the powers of earth: no lightnings
For her – maniacal in the clouds. No need for
&n
bsp; Signs with their skull and crossbones, chain-link gates:
Danger! Keep Out! High Gravity! she’s friendlier.
Won’t nurse – unlike the magnetic powers – repugnance;
Would reconcile, draw close: her passion’s love.
No terrors lurking in her depths, like those
Bound in that buzzing strongbox of the atom,
Terrors that, loosened, turn the hills vesuvian,
Trace in cremation where the cities were.