Manhood for Amateurs

Like, Cosmic

I recently read in a news report that Voyager 2 is about to pass through our sun’s termination shock. I’m not sure what that means — something to do with the limits of the solar wind and the entry into the interstellar medium that fills the space between stars — but it struck me because I’ve been thinking a lot about the two Voyager probes. I happened to listen to a podcast of WNYC’s wonderful Radiolab program not long ago, an episode devoted to contemplating the romance and the grim realities of space travel. Into the latter category Radiolab’s hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, placed impossible distances, unbearable extremes of temperature, implacable laws of gravity and time, and the likely rarity and fragility of spacefaring civilizations. To supply the romance, they presented a woman named Ann Druyan. She had been one of the members of the team that NASA recruited back in the mid-seventies to assemble the sounds and images encoded on the famous Golden Record that was carried on board Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 as a greeting to the galaxy and (necessarily, given the relatively slow pace of travel) as a message to the future. You know the one: whale songs, Brandenburg concertos and didgeridoo, thunder and rain, human heartbeats, and the synaptic crackle of an EEG. Druyan described how the shared sense of intimate grandeur and the freewheeling spirit she experienced while working to produce the Golden Record encouraged her to fall in love with, and eventually marry, one of her colleagues on the project. She revealed that the brain-function and circulatory sounds of a human being featured on the golden disc that NASA sent out into the endless emptiness, now traveling at a rate of 38,000 miles per hour toward the far-flung neighborhoods of the stars AC+79 3888 and Ross 248, were those of her own living body. They were recorded, she told Radiolab, more or less on the day she discovered she had fallen utterly and helplessly and giddily in love with that colleague, the project’s originator, Dr. Carl Sagan. Her heart and brain; their efflorescing love; and the greetings of an entire planet lobbed with the glee of a paperboy across a trillion miles of space that may be home to no one at all.

Dr. Sagan appears to have been a bit of a pothead, and some have looked at the vast, brilliant, loopy, complicatedly simple interstellar communication schemes he adumbrated during the late sixties and seventies and concluded that marijuana must have been part of the impetus behind them. Intuitively, I feel both the merit and the injustice in this conclusion, for, like the grand schemes of Dr. Carl Sagan, I am myself a child of the 1970s. Toward the end of the summer of 1977, when in turn two Titan III rockets lifted Voyagers 1 and 2 into orbit and sent them on their arcing slingshot courses across the solar system, I was fourteen years old, and my favorite item of clothing was a T-shirt purchased on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland, that depicted a square-rigged galleon in full sail across a sea of space out of whose misty distance there emerged the supernova eyes and nebular bosom of an intergalactic babe. My favorite novel was Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven, in which a genetically lucky female flower child and a youth-drug-addicted, world-tripping old man become lovers and uncover (among other secrets) the hidden history of humankind while exploring a ring-shaped artificial “planet” a million miles in diameter. My favorite comic book was Jim Starlin’s Warlock (1975–6), whose hero was a star-faring, all-powerful, golden-skinned loser trapped in a mutually self-destructive yet strangely empowering relationship with a vampiric gem embedded in his own forehead. It would be another few years before I got involved with marijuana, but when I did, all that I ever found, in a way, was more of what I had already known: that everything, if you stopped to think about it, was, like, cosmic, even — if not especially — the power of sex and love.

There is no more useless activity than that of periodization, the packaging of history, in particular cultural history, into discrete eras — the Jazz Age, the Greatest Generation, the Eisenhower years, the Sixties. Such periods can never be honestly articulated without recourse to so many demurrals and arbitrary demarcations, and the granting of so many exceptions, as to render them practically useless for any kind of serious historical purpose. In times of supposed license, repression reigns freely all around; in eras renowned for their conventionality, oddballs and freaks hoist their banners high. And yet when I heard the gifted and intelligent Ann Druyan wondering, fervently but not without a sense of her own goofiness, if perhaps ages hence some technomagical future alien race might be able to reconstitute, from the record of her brain waves, her feeling of incipient passion for her man and for the work they undertook together, as equals, partners, and lovers — to re-create the sense of how it felt to be Ann Druyan on an afternoon in New York City during those infatuated, boundary-breaking, termination-shock-crossing years — I knew that I was listening, carried as by a lonely probe across the distances, to the voice of the 1970s.

If we are conducting our lives in the usual fashion, each of us serves as a constant source of embarrassment to his or her future self, and by the same formula, all “eras” can be made to look ridiculous in retrospect. But the seventies have always been prone to more ridicule than their twentieth century cousin-decades, without anyone giving sufficient notice to the fact that it was the seventies themselves that originated the teasing (Annie Hall, Nashville, the Me Decade, “You’re So Vain”). It required no retrospection for the occupants of the zone now understood as the seventies to acknowledge the goofiness in all their pieties and solipsisms, and it is a mark of our own naïveté (at least) to suppose that a straight-faced young tax attorney going out on a Saturday night in 1974 wearing platform boots, glitter mascara, and his hair combed up into a two-foot Isro, for example, did not realize that he looked pretty silly. It’s just that looking like a fool was correctly understood to be a likely if not an inevitable result of the taking of risks. The sense of liberation that resulted from such risk-taking, however conventionalized or routine it became, was felt for a little while to be well worth the price in foolishness. We are crippled in so many ways today by the desire to avoid fashion mistakes, to elude ridicule — a desire that leads at one extreme to the smiling elisions of political candidates and on the other to the awful tyranny of cool — that this willingness to be foolish is hard for us to sympathize with or understand. In this age of Gawker.com, we have forgotten the seventies spirit of mockery that smirks at the pretensions and fatuities of others in a way that originates with and encompasses ourselves. Atom for atom, we are made of exactly the same stuff as all the stars and galaxies. That is one of the cosmic, Warlock-worthy facts that I learned in the seventies. If you drop the S in cosmic, you arrive at the understanding that vanity, pomposity, and foolishness are at once communal and individual, like stardust. And so are our aspirations and our longing, somehow, to survive. The personal is political was a mantra of seventies feminism, but the spirit of that age, embodied perfectly in the interstellar voyage of Ann Druyan’s amorous EEG, might be more accurately summarized as The personal is universal, or The personal is fucking cosmic, baby!

We tend, through films, novels, and television programs, to view the seventies as the decade when the wheels came off the cart, when, to quote an anthem of the time, “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls,” when America fell from her pedestal of God-fearing rectitude or was replaced gradually by an Imagineered simulacrum of itself, when moms wore kaftans and dads wore huge sideburns and they both did Quaaludes and went to key parties, when the comforting if rigid old Puritan-Victorian rules of social conduct, shaken in the sixties, finally gave way altogether like a mudslide in a California canyon, when New York City tottered like a bellwether toward the apocalypse, and the blockbuster-film mentality that has spread and cheapened pretty much everything was born. Or else — as on That 70s Show—we view the time, compared to the present, as having been a kind of paradoxical stasis of nuclear-family stability and cheesy normality.

Neither of these views is correct. What happened in the seventies was that, as at no other time before or since in our history, Americans — especially American women — were, for better and worse, free. Liberated, we cast aside the laws and limitations of the old familiar system to sail like Voyager out into the interstellar medium beyond. You can see it on the album covers of every band of meaty bohunks from Cleveland or Sheffield — the Raspberries, the Sweet, Aerosmith — who ever appeared with their hair piled high atop their heads and mascara on their eyes and their masculinity fully, if amusingly, intact. You can see it in a movie like the powerful documentary 51 Birch Street, which is a kind of bitter and glorious paean to the way the seventies blew open the doors of one ordinary suburban American marriage, briefly offering to a conventionally trapped husband and wife new ways of being a man, a woman, a couple. You can see it in the sad contrast that Elizabeth Isadora Gold drew, in an essay for The Believer, between today’s so-called chick lit and popular women’s novels of the seventies like Fear of Flying and The Women’s Room, in which women appeared, for the first time in all of modern literature, as genuine adventurers, sailing out into the blue as the heroes of their own sexual and intellectual quests, finding freedom and fulfillment and making fools of themselves.

The seventies were, finally, about Voyager, loopiness and all: about expanding consciousness by making contact, about translating yourself in all your particulars to a kind of universal message of love and desire and willingness to explore. They were about consciousness and self-consciousness (and sometimes loss of consciousness) and all the sense of genuine liberation, however goofy or naive or short-lived or untenable, that those things can impart. We can accept the invitation extended by those years to laugh at them, but in doing so, we are only getting in on the joke.

And God knows we have nothing in the line of liberation to make as counteroffer. Where women were once trapped inside a single narrative of child-rearing and housekeeping, the introduction of a second narrative of fulfillment through work and intellectual accomplishment has left them trapped in a kind of permanent ongoing guest role in both, able to star or to shine in neither. As for the supposed liberation of men, if all the socially viable ways of being a man (not counting those afforded and tolerated in gay culture) were languages or species of plants or animals, we would be living in a virtual monoculture. A dozen years from now, sometime around 2020 or so, when the atomic power plants carried on board the two Voyagers give out, all transmissions from the edge of things will cease, and the record that those two probes carry, of a moment’s giddy will to expand the bright tiny circle of its consciousness, will drift on, in silence and darkness, waiting.

Subterranean

One June night in 1972, an early hurricane named Agnes rolled up the East Coast, raising rivers and drowning railroads and knocking out power all over the D.C. area. My family was living at my grandparents’ house in Silver Spring that summer while we waited for construction to finish on a new house. My parents and grandfather were out for the evening, and my brother and I were left in the care of our grandmother, who seemed not to know what to do with us at seven o’clock on a Saturday night when the lights winked out and the television blacked over and she found herselfalone with two bored boys only too eager to get busy in the darkness with the candles and the matches.

So she sent us to bed down in the basement, and though I remember being put out at the injustice of this decision, she was a grandmother in the quietly adamantine style, and there was no appeal and nothing to be done. My brother and I climbed into the convertible sofa bed we shared, and there was a clap of thunder, and I shut my eyes. A moment later I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder, his voice soft and taut as if some unpleasant business was at hand.

“It’s time to get up,” he said. Somehow, as though in an instant, the entire night had passed — the only time in my life I remember having experienced such a passage — and it was morning. “But be careful.”

My brother and I lowered our skinny legs over the sides of the sofa bed and plunged to our knees in cold rainwater. In the night, our basement room had been transformed, like Max’s bedroom in Where the Wild Things Are, into a swimming pool, a rippled lake, a midnight sea. It was like magic, in all the delight and fearsomeness of the word. We might have been drowned or washed away. We might have paddled on sofa-cushion rafts to the far-off shores of our parents’ bedroom. Magic, at both ends of the spectrum, is what happens in the basements of houses.

My grandfather had finished the basement sometime during the late 1950s in grooved plywood paneling and glossy black linoleum that, even on the hottest day of the summer, was as cold and hard as the frozen seas of Triton. With his tools, wiry arms, and pragmatic imagination, he had wrested four rooms and a bathroom out of a dank, dark hole under his house. There were two parlors furnished with cast-off and outmoded living room sets of the premodern era, the chairs creaky and stuffed with horsehair. In one parlor a neglected piano incrementally untuned itself, and in the other, on a small table designed expressly for the purpose, sat a great black piano of a telephone. It had a clacking iron dial that sprained your fingers, and when it rang like a firehouse alarm, you expected to find Alfalfa or Spanky on the other end of the line. The drawers of the end tables cataloged the entropy of board games, the history of typing supplies, the morphology of swizzle sticks and coasters. The basement bedroom in which my parents spent that hurricane summer had sheltered my mother’s younger brother in the latter days of his adolescence and was decorated with a large black-and-white poster, popular during the late-sixties “nostalgia revival” (which no one then suspected would turn out to be permanent), of W. C. Fields playing a poker hand very close to the vest. Fields wore a sour expression, and there was always some residue of sourness in the bedroom, some discontent in the recollection of my uncle’s time there, as if his tenure had carried an element of exile. Exile, too — the estrangement of the dungeon dweller, of the narrator of Richard Matheson’s classic story “Born of Man and Woman”—is part of the enchantment of basements. At night my mother and father, only a few years away from separation and eventual divorce, would shut the door that did not quite shut and consider with growing discontentment the hand they had been dealt.

There were long-standing, sometimes bitter tensions in the other marriage under the roof that summer, and whenever my grandfather wanted to partake of the magic of exile, he would retreat to his underground workshop. It was dominated by a massive workbench built from pine and pegboard and fitted with a formidable screw vise. He had a table saw and a table drill, an extensive library of hand tools for working wood, metal, and leather, and a small laundry area, nominally my grandmother’s territory but equipped with a sink and a stopcock to which you could attach the hose of a Bunsen burner. My grandfather, a patent lawyer, was an inventor in his own right, the holder of U.S. patent number 3826667 for something he called “magnetite paint.” He was also an amateur photographer and maintained an improvised darkroom, with developing pans ranged alongside the steel laundry sink and a wooden photo enlarger of his own construction hunched like a big plywood mantis in a corner.

In those days the pages of comic books were frequently home to cutaway diagrams of secret lairs and headquarters, each with careful arrows pointing to the Sleeping Quarters, the Recreation Area, and — of course — the Research Laboratory. A couple of years after the night of the hurricane (and far sooner than my judgment or trustworthiness merited), my grandfather gave me the run of his Batcave. As soon as we arrived for a visit, I would go down there and begin to decoct, construct, rummage, demolish, assemble, snoop, waste time, get into trouble. I took apart broken machines and appliances and, in the name of my research, broke things that had nothing wrong with them. I spoiled splendid plans and managed to turn worthless junk into faithful scale models of things that no one had ever seen. I smashed my fingers with hammers, cut them with saws and chisels, burned them on the tips of soldering irons. I bled. I wept furtive tears over my injuries, which, like a wounded gangster, I was obliged to treat secretly lest I be banned from the basement forever. I went spelunking in deep closets and cabinets and picked out atonal versions of the theme from Mission: Impossible on the piano. Mostly, I lay around for hours on the musty sofa, utterly bored with myself and the universe, flooded as by a passing hurricane by the kind of tedium a child can feel only at his grandparents’ house, wondering what it would be like to be somebody, somewhere, doing something, anything.

All of those activities, it seems to me now, helped form the basis for my life as a writer, a denizen of the basement of my soul. I suppose it is no accident that basements, hidden lairs, and underground settings have featured so routinely in my fiction: the gang rape of Happy the collie in the basement of the Bellwethers’ house in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the macabre hideout of James Leer in Wonder Boys, the numerous hiding places and fortresses of solitude in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the mysterious subterranean Untershtot of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, accessible by hole from the archetypical basement of the Hotel Zamenhof. In almost everything I’ve written, you can find buried treasuries, Batcaves and hidey-holes, half-forgotten underground worlds that perhaps encode the rapture and the bitterness of my own isolation.

The house that we eventually moved into after that summer at my grandparents’ had a fine dank basement of its own, not so well finished but spectacularly equipped with a couple of earthen crawl spaces worthy of Montresor and Fortunato and a mysterious deep hole at its heart that was the burrow of a strange, rumbling creature known as the Sump Pump. As my parents’ marriage fell apart, I took to spending more and more of my time down there, making stop-motion science-fiction epics with my Super 8 camera, curating and organizing and hiding inside the boxes of my comic book collection, listening to Casey Kasem count them down. It was a new basement, but it had the necessary residue of exile and mystery, and when you returned from a session down there, you could feel something following you, its hand at the back of your neck, racing you up to the light at the top of the stairs.

Now I live in Northern California, where, as if in obedience to some doctrine of spiritual health and equilibrium, houses do not, as a rule, have basements. My own children are reduced to the expedient — surely not to be disdained — of creating impromptu clubhouses from blankets, cushions, and chairs, or of seeking inspiration in the daylight quotidian fastness of their bedrooms. I wonder where it settles, the dark tide of magical boredom that was the source of all my own inspiration, in a house without a basement to catch and hold it like a cistern. I have often found myself wishing my kids had somewhere they could go to get away, get lost, feel frightened and safe at the same time. Someplace deep and buried, unsuspected by and inaccessible to any parent, and right underfoot.

Anyway, we built them a little tree house in the California buck-eye in the backyard. It’s bright, open, sky-bound, a crow’s nest for the brigantine of their play. I worry that it is insufficiently dank, gloomy, remote, mysterious, but as they have filled it with random things, randomly broken and repaired, I have had reason to hope: hope that when they shut its bright green door, the world with all its puzzling business feels muffled and distant. Hope that they lie up there on their backs for hours, feeling tragic, and happy, and terribly, terribly bored.

XO9

I swear I was twelve years old before my grandmother let me go into a men’s room alone. If we were hanging around downtown Washington — and she was a great one for hanging around downtown, a flaneur in White Shoulders and a black sweater set — she used to smuggle me into the ladies’ lounge at Garfinckel’s department store when I had to go to the bathroom, even if getting there required a twenty-block walk, and when I say smuggled, I mean pushed me like a dollyload of bricks while loudly exhorting me to cut in front of the blind woman with the oxygen tank. It had to be Garfinckel’s, no matter how long a schlep that meant, because only there, amid the caged parakeets and the splendor of the ladies’ lounge, did the standard of hygiene come even remotely close to her own. The truth is that even Garfinckel’s fell short. Before I was permitted to touch my flesh to the Garfinckel’s toilet, she had to enter the stall like a fireman shouldering his way into a burning house, face grim and set, taking minimal sips of air through her nostrils, and wipe down the seat with a paper towel and the Lysol that at all times she kept in a small spray bottle in her handbag. When I was finished with my business, I was expected to summon her so that she could, with a single furious kick of her tiny foot, deploy the flush handle, flush handles being widely known to medical science as festering vectors of disease. Her spray bottle of Lysol came out on buses, too, to render the Naugahyde seats fit for contact, and she whipped it out whenever we went to sit on a bench in Dupont Circle for a session of her favorite pastime in that era: scowling at the “hippies” who gathered there and, in an undertone that was not especially low, mocking them. When she washed the dishes, she would encase each plate and fork in plastic wrap before returning it to the cabinet or drawer. She washed Dixie cups fresh from the package in soap and hot water. She had survived pogrom and transatlantic crossing and Depression and war, and she was not afraid of anything, least of all her son, my father, but she was terrified beyond reason of germs and bacteria.

When I was a kid I found this behavior fascinating, and as I got older, it was good for a laugh, but now I see that the poor woman was suffering from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder: OCD, or XO9, as my younger son used to believe it was known. He was hearing a lot about XO9 and about my grandmother, because for a while my older son started believing that anything that happened to him on one side of his body — a pinch, a tickle, his mother’s taking hold of his hand to cross a busy street — needed to happen right away on the other side of his body, too, or else he would feel “like I’m going to die.” This particular form of the disorder, it turned out, meant he had symmetry issues, and there were other ones, including a brief but intense inability to get through five minutes of consciousness without mentioning cows at least once. These things mostly came and went, ramifying wildly, foliating like creepers through the kid’s thoughts and, to some degree, the discourse of our family before fading with the help — help that my grandmother never received — of some fairly simple cognitive-therapy techniques and his grateful eagerness to try them. He was so relieved to learn that this thing could be named, could be talked about, that he began to feel better simply through the act of discussing it (which I think is why he consented immediately when I asked his permission to write about it).

This thing runs in families, and I can’t help also seeing its signs in my father, an obsessively completist collector of stamps, coins, bubblegum cards, tobacco cards, autographs, Big Little Books, Ovaltine premiums, magazines, books, classical recordings — all kinds of stuff — the collections proliferating, branching off, some running their course, some enduring for decades. He’s a man who cannot enter a room without aligning, or suppressing an overwhelming urge to align, the corners of books with the corners of tables they lie upon; a man whose neckties hang in a closet as neatly as the pipes of a church organ and whose desk drawers look like aerial photographs of a secret weapons facility in the Nevada desert.

My grandmother, my father, my son, and me. My few collections are incomplete, I have braved hellish shitholes without benefit or need of Lysol, and I have never experienced any bodily compulsions beyond those of my animal appetites. But I have this thing where I can’t stop trying to fix something that’s broken, some lock that won’t open even with the right combination, some computer program that won’t run or channel that won’t TiVo — even if I have to stay up till four o’clock in the morning or miss out on the party in the next room to figure out what’s wrong and how to repair it. Even if you resort to physically removing me from the vicinity of the problem, I will not be fully present in conversation or be able to sleep or find any savor in life whatsoever until I have solved it or, at long last, conceded defeat. Over the years certain random words or phrases, such as Lampedusa, weasels, and Ted Kennedy, have gotten trapped like flies in the casements of my brain and buzzed in fits for months or even years until some unknown hand threw up an invisible sash and they flew out. I must have said the word monkeys at least once a day for the past ten years, not counting references to actual simians or my children. And — this is not a boast — I rock. Davening, my wife calls it: steady, rapid, rhythmic rocking, sometimes fitful, sometimes continuous, from foot to foot when I’m standing, and from front to back when I’m sitting down. Rocking like a junkie who needs a fix, a madman on the subway, a devout Jew at prayer, a kid who really needs to pee.

I’m davening as I write these words, and it’s always while I’m in the act of writing that the impulse to rock grows strongest, that the rocking feels the best, the most necessary and right. The more easily the words come, the more wildly I rock. When I consider the problem-solving nature of writing fiction — how whatever book I happen to be working on is always broken, stuck, incomplete, a Yale lock that won’t open, a subroutine that won’t execute, yet day after day I return to it knowing that if I just keep at it, I will pop the thing loose — it begins to seem to me that writing may be in part a disorder: sheer, unfettered XO9. Look at Borges with his knives and his tigers, or Nabokov with his butterflies, or Irving with his bears, or Plath with her camps and her ovens; look at every writer, writing the same damn story, the same poem, returning endlessly to the same themes, the same motifs, the same locales, the same lost summer or girl or father, book after book. Why do you keep writing about gay men who are friends with straight men? people want to know. Why are bad things always happening to dogs in your books? What’s with all the sky similes? Why did you use the word spavined, like, seventeen times in one novel? Sometimes I try to come up with sensible answers to these questions, logical explanations for these recurring tropes, motifs, and phrases, but in truth there’s only one honest answer that a writer in the grip of XO9 can give: I can’t help it.

Sky and Telescope

When my father was a young pediatrician, he took care of a patient named Ira. My father had his favorite patients, and at the dinner table sometimes we used to hear about them. They tended to be either black or Jewish; Ira was the latter. He used to talk to my father about the stars.

“Ira was telling me today about Aldebaran,” my father might say while he carefully smashed each carrot, pea, and cube of chuck roast in his dish of my mother’s beef stew into a grayish paste. He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat. Hence he feels he needs to disguise it. “Apparently, it’s a binary system.”

This Ira kid was six, seven: my exact contemporary. Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Tau Ceti. He knew whether they were blue or red. He understood the Doppler effect as it pertained to starlight. He even knew the Greek myths that underpinned so many of the constellations.

Now, I had strangely possessive feelings about mythology. Once I came upon a copy of D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths lying on a table in the school media center, lying there where any shmo could come along and pick it up and discover for himself the dark and vivid world that lay inside the covers of that book. Quickly, I returned it to the safe anonymity of the 398s.

Mythology was my territory. So I decided to horn in on Ira’s.

I asked for a telescope. At Hannukah, one was duly provided, along with a small, dense, rather dry British volume entitled Astronomy in Colour. I have disappointed memories of that telescope. It was made of blue plastic and heavy gray cardboard, with a rickety metal tripod. It did not, as I had imagined, work by letting you put your eye up against the fiery flank of the universe itself. It had a small, bleary oculus that received a shimmery reflection from a tiny mirror that lived all alone at the bottom of the long cardboard tube. It had a focus knob that knowingly tormented you with seventeen different varieties of blur. It was not so much a telescope as a kind of antikaleidoscope, its interior vista endlessly static and dim. The book had a star chart and some interesting drawings of spacecraft and imaginary Saturnscapes. But its prose and its ideas were way over my head and of no real use, especially at night, in the dark, when I really needed the book. In the end, after some cursory study, I learned to find five or six of the most obvious constellations. Polaris, Betelgeuse. Venus and Mars.

My astronomical knowledge has not advanced very far since then. I get the Doppler effect. I know now what a binary system is. But I never showed the gift for astrophysics that I hoped to discover in myself, any more than I would later turn out to be a genius at chemistry, electric guitar, or the free-throw line. I never presented any threat to Ira. The starry heavens became a lifelong locus of insufficiency, but so is everything you love most, and that bitter memory has never stopped me from taking an interest in the night sky and its behavior.

Several years ago my wife bought me my second telescope. It is incredibly enormous. It is nuclear-powered, made of iron mined from an asteroid, and weighs seven metric tons. Its mirror is broad and brilliant and conveys an image of the moon so magnified that under a quarter of its visible surface more than fills the eyepiece. You can see the shadows of crater rims, the snaggled teeth of giant craters like Pythagoras and Herschel. The thing uses GPS and has a processor to allow it to know where it is and what you’re looking at. When you train it on what appears to the naked eye to be a blank, black patch of sky, you find the oculus aglitter with stars and realize that beyond them could be seen, if you had a more powerful scope, more glittering specks of light and still more beyond them. And you feel a shallow shiver of how deep space really is.

Unfortunately, the thing requires a winch, a derrick, and a team of elephants to transport it. Also, I live in the city, in Berkeley, California, and when there’s no fog to obscure it, our night sky is polluted with light. After my initial burst of enthusiasm for the telescope, I began to question its usefulness. By the time you, Tantor, and Queenie got the thing out to the front yard (where you could see about forty-two degrees of heavenly arc among the housetops and trees), you had dented a wall, stubbed your toe, pulled a muscle in your shoulder, and suffered a heart attack on the front porch. I fantasized about building a little observatory on top of the house where I could use the telescope without having to move it, but soon I realized that even if I could afford to do such a thing, there would be nothing much to see between the fog and the flooded sky once I got up there. So in time, the telescope was returned to its tuba-capable case and humped up to the attic to reproach me with my inadequacy like the heavens themselves.

This summer we shipped it to Maine. We’ve been coming here for the past few summers, and our good landlords let us store things in the basement of their house over the year, even enormous things like this telescope. The weather has been rotten, but tonight, as on four or five other fine nights, the sky just knocks you over. I used to share a house with a graduate student in astronomy who told me that when you first reach the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where Cal maintains the Keck Observatory, your eyes are so starved for oxygen that they see almost nothing distinctive in the sky, a sparkly gauze. He described bending over to take a few deep breaths and then throwing his head back to take in with new oxygen-rich eyes, the newly blazing archipelago of lights. That is how the Maine sky can look sometimes to a city dweller. It dizzies you.

Jupiter has been working its nightly way across the sky all month. The word is debased, but when I first got Jupiter in the eyepiece, I thrilled at what I saw. Lined up to its left in a tidy row like ducklings swam four of its thirty-nine moons. The moons of Jupiter! Who would not thrill at the sight of them and the sound of their name? They were no bigger in the eyepiece than large stars to the naked eye, but they were there, unmistakably, and as I stood in the chill evening with crickets playing the summer offstage and mosquitoes grazing on my ankles, I felt as if I were there, too: out there, four hundred million miles away, orbiting that disappointed star.

That is a shared promise of telescopes and literature: to create an illusion of interstellar or interhuman travel within the confines of your own skull. Though I have always been aware of the connection between stories and constellations, between the beauty of the stars and the perhaps even greater beauty of their names, I never truly felt it until I looked through a first-rate instrument at an unspoiled sky.

“It kind of freaks me out to think about that, Dad,” my older son said after I had him look through the telescope at one of those endlessly deep and star-packed regions of space that look empty to the naked eye. “I mean, we’re so small.”

“True,” I said.

“We’re, like, nothing.”

“Well, yeah. Except to each other.”

And then I pointed the telescope at Jupiter and its brood of moons and had him take a look, and he did a little thrilling himself. It’s just so shocking somehow to see them there, plain as stars, when you can look at the same spot with no telescope and see a solitary speck of gold. “Think of Galileo,” I told my son. “You and I know those moons are going to be there, but Galileo had no idea when he first saw them that they were going to be there. He just had the weird inspiration to point a newfangled set of lenses at the king of planets and check it out. Think how surprised he must have been!”

“Okay, that’s awesome,” my son agreed, backing away from the eyepiece. “What happens if we point it at the moon?”

Maybe he or one of my other children will turn out like Ira, to have the gift of stars. He or she will be able to look up at the sky and see not myths and legends and a history of failure but information, gases and voids, cold, infernal, luminous and pure. Or maybe my children will just look up and remember the weight of my hand on their shoulders as they stood beside me on a warm summer night, the rasp of my beard against their cheek, my voice soft at their ear, telling them, Look.