And, secondly, on the ride home, gliding past the marshes, which were dark now, making the window into a mirror, I saw my own gazing eye, in three-quarters view, unexpectedly close in the black glass, watery and round, like the watchful dark orb of a deer. A deer eye, fearful and alert- hostile or neutral, I couldn’t quite tell. We cannot think or feel with the brain of another creature but we can see its eyes, those sensitive organs which the brain protrudes. My reflected face loomed inches from mine, the skin a dirty metallic color, skimming along in mid-air, transparent to the industrial shapes and receding lit windows, like the visage of a spy from outer space, an evilly staring alter ego. It gave me a start, and forestalled the nap I had scheduled for myself, the fifteen minutes of sleep that mark the end of a commuter’s day and fortify him or her for an evening at home.
Another foot of snow has fallen on top of the two feet already on the ground. I waded out across the front lawn to take down the Christmas lights that we run up on the flagpole as our part of the annual pretense that God descended to Earth in a baby’s body. The neighbors expect it. I’ve been told that even ships at sea-the lonely-looking oil tankers that, like long cardboard silhouettes on a slow string, edge into Salem Harbor-appreciate it. But my wife, who has strict ideas on many topics, says that nobody with any taste keeps lights up after Twelfth Night. Her father never did. Twelfth Night came and went, and there was no thaw in sight, so I seized this even mildly sunny day, the sun a white blur in a high thin cloud cover.
Walking through snow up to my crotch turned out to be an ordeal almost comical in its severity-worse even than those childhood memories we distrust in hindsight, of eye-high drifts and tunnels from the front porch. My yard, where I amble back and forth in the summer practicing chip shots and setting up croquet wickets in anticipation of a visit from my grandchildren, had become huge, an antarctic continent. Every step sucked at my entire leg with the force of gravity on another, much larger, planet. My boots quickly filled with snow-a chilly, sticky sensation that came back to me from sixty years ago. Extracting my leg from each socket was like pulling a giant tooth. I wondered if the deer was watching and could hear my grunts, my laughter at my physical plight. Her velvety white-rimmed ears would prick, her eyes would show no more emotion than my own bulging eyes in the flickering black window of the commuter train. Suppose my heart decided to flip shut-to knock off for an eternity-long coffee break-at this moment. Would the deer come and sniff curiously, would the smell of my hair still frighten her, would the universe branch and carry me intact into another portion of endless space? Are the funnel vortices of black holes the passageways whereby we enter the afterlife?
But I was already on another planet. Each step a comical struggle, I fought my way to the pole on its little flagstoned platform-a conceit of the previous owner, a nautical man who loved to stand and take in his view of Massachusetts Bay. I dug down to where the ends of the Christmas light cords had been pegged or tied to a handy bush. The experience was archaeological, really, and made me feel, as my numb fingers grappled at the knots, the cold connection between the buried and the present.
So much snow wraps the world in cosmic feeling. The euonymus hedge, no longer defenseless, is rounded in its thick white armor like a futuristic motor vehicle. A transcendent sparkle rides the surface; microscopic icy prisms send rainbows to my retinas. I am immersed in the white blind brute reality of nature, heartless and beautiful. I am in the rushing waterfall, the thunderhead cradle of blue new stars in a proximate galaxy. Beneath the dazzling skin of snow, a whole lost world waited to be born again, its details-blades of grass, pegs holding knotted ropes-faithfully tucked into the realm of the potential. I coiled the strings of Christmas lights, stiff and lumpy with ice, into their cardboard box and carried the box to the third floor. From the third-floor windows I looked for deer tracks, but of course there were none. She must be huddled in the tent-shaped shelter beneath a hemlock, the wet dark orb of her eye watchful. To stick a pin into that bulging eye-that would be a wicked thrill, a tunnel into another world.
Instead of deer tracks I saw curious paths between the trees, the oaks around the driveway, from one trunk to another, and then vanishing, bat-shaped dents in the snow. It took me surprisingly long to deduce that these were the body-prints of squirrels, only half hibernating, quickly floundering from one tree to another. But what makes them think one tree might be an improvement over another? A bed of grass in one, a cache of acorns in another. Like rich Manhattanites, they scuttle from Park Avenue to Wall Street and back, minimizing their moments on the ground. On this scorched planet we human beings are not yet quite alone; there is still other life. Squirrels, rats, deer, the last rhinos and cheetahs. Insects, of course, in their undismayable selfless multitudes.
And then the next day, or the next, awaking too early, unsettled by the hyperactive, menacing weather-Gloria is falling in love with the different channels’ weathermen, and can tell them all apart-I was walking in the pre-dawn semi-dark down to the mailbox, where the delivery man throws the newspaper, sparing himself the trouble of our driveway. Above me a two-thirds moon hung in a sky already blue. I looked up at this apparition and tried to see it as it is, a ball in space, illuminated by a single light-source. The direction of the source was clearly indicated by the way the light lay; it was somewhere over my shoulder. The sun was in the southeast but not yet risen. I tried to make myself realize that the moon was hoisted into the same light that had not yet touched me; there is no other light; it soaks the inner solar system, in whose interplanetary spaces there is no night and day; and this light would not soon be lifting over the horizon behind my left shoulder, beyond the cluster of quaintly named local islands, but in fact the surface I am standing on and all surface continuous with it to the horizon of the sea and beyond was plunging forward the sun, like the floor of a vast airplane crashing, a vast curved floor monumentally, imperceptibly spinning in the direction dead against that in which the sun like a knob in a slotted groove would arc across the sky to make another day in my minuscule, clinging, transitory, insectlike life. Inside my curved skull I approached this spatial visualization as if approaching the edge of a windswept cliff or steep slippery-tiled roof; then my mind darted back, dizzy, into the safety of pre-scientific stupidity. I could not at all visualize how the moon-its waxing and waning; its presenting always the same face to the Earth; its monthly revolution; its tug on the tides-fit into this gigantic toy of gravity with all its balls of matter. Everything went flat for me; the snow-packed driveway beneath my feet stopped moving.
How curious it is, given the scientific view of the universe as ultimately causeless and accidental, that the moon and the sun are the exact same size in the sky, as we see in a solar eclipse, where the fit is so exact that Bailey’s beads of sunlight shoot out rays through the valleys of the moon. No wonder men for millennia took these two heavenly bodies, so disparate in astronomical fact, to be twin gods-competing brothers, or a brother and sister safeguarding different aspects of the human soul. The kinship did not have to be. In another easily imagined system there might be two moons, or five, or none. There might be two suns, a large and a small, locked in a gravitational embrace, setting and rising at opposite ends of the horizon. Somewhere beyond Jupiter our space-exploring vehicles show the sun as another star, no brighter than Venus from our planet’s vantage. One of the scientific sages I admired as a boy, a kindly prune-faced dwarf who appeared on public television, educating the masses, said that, if all our cosmological wisdom had to be passed on to a benighted future in a single sentence, the sentence should be The sun is a star.