There is in this piece more romanticism than it should have had to carry — I confess it before it is held against me. One thing intercedes for me: it is a relic of the age of youth — the age in which love is everything, in which the stars, like bodies, are its arena, in which imagination is twin to reality, and legend loftier than the society page of the newspapers.
And were it not for my certainty that my dear reader knows love, and that it appears to her (or one day appeared to her) in the robe I have dressed it in, and that she understands that romanticism is not in truth so repellent as they now claim — I should not have published this piece today, nor kept it where it has lain all this long while.
T. S.
Tending the stars was her pastime. As though she were a priest of the Chaldeans, communing with the stars by night in worship,
or an elder of the desert Arabs who holds the watching of them a science and an art — not a girl living in the middle of a century that disbelieves in the stars, and still young enough to
have tended hearts instead.
What — did she see in the stars what we do not see? Was she bound to them by some kinship? Did she find in certain of them her own self? Questions that ran through my mind whenever I watched her in those stellar trances of hers, like the raptures of Rabi'a, or heard of her evenings outside her tent at Dhour el-Choueir, or on the seashore in Beirut, or upon her solitary bed on the roof of her house, which (it too) misses her.
There she would lose herself. Survey the universe and all that is in it. Dream. Search for solutions to problems it was an injustice should ever cross the sea of her life. In her imagination murmurings danced which, had she set
them down on blue paper, poetry would have known its mistress. And she would tend the stars.
The world of the stars was virgin ground to me, and she went on revealing its unknown regions to me until I stood upon the secrets of her worship. That was in the last days before the parting — and behold, I was coming to know her anew: to know her for the first time.
And behold, I understood her saying: "And if one day we part, the stars will bring us together."
*
How it astonished me in J. — and everything about her was strange — a moment that recurred every evening. She would be talking, or listening, or talking as she listened, and you would see her fall silent without warning, and stare upward, and stare. Then she would cry out, her whole body crying with her mouth:
— Vega!
Did I not say the world of the stars was virgin ground to me? When I first heard her cry I did not grasp what she meant. I fancied she was speaking the Italian she was so fond of, or that Archimedes was shouting: Eureka!
She turned to me smiling, and I set about asking what she meant — asking those two springs clear down to the last pebble, asking her two eyes which I loved, marveling how, for the first time, I loved two at once!
And she gave me to understand, mistress of her subject, that Vega is one of the stars, that it is that resplendent star there — and she pointed upward as though she aspired to touch it with her forefinger. And she added, wondering:
— But do you not see the Lyre? Look there, those three stars above the parallelogram; that is the Lyre, and the first of the shining three is Vega.
— So there is no Vega without the Lyre, and no Lyre without Vega?
— Just so, my friend. Do you not see how that one enfolds this, and this one crowns that? Do you not see the two of them, two
in one?
*
One evening J. told me the story of Vega, and there was in her a strained air I had not noticed in her before. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, and drew her head near to mine. And a few moments later I was listening.
"Long ago there dwelt in the sky Shih Nu (that is her name in China; in Japan it is Tanabata), daughter of the god of the sun, and goddess of weaving. She would pass the whole of her day over the spindle, weaving from it radiance for the stars, light and shadow for the sun, and for the dawn its pale colors. The gods would see what she wove and stand amazed; but if they turned toward her, the weaver made them forget the beauty of the weave.
"It happened one day that some passing clouds troubled the clearness of the sky, and Shih Nu hastened to her spindle, carrying it down beneath the clouds to grant the earth a flood of clarity. And perhaps she came nearer the earth than she supposed (in a manuscript of one of Confucius's disciples I read that the chief of the gods contrived to make her come