And suddenly she was so strange he couldn’t believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else’s house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman, drunk, coming home late late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser.
We never burned right.
It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing.
And for a moment, Vinia thought that she and Jim might be caught by a sudden drop of great masses of honey from above, sealing them into this tree forever, enchanted, in amber, to be seen by anyone in the next thousand years who strolled by, while the weather of all ages rained and thundered and turned green outside the tree.
The wine still waits in the cellars below. My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark. The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer. Why and how? Because I say it is so.
I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.
He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man.
He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question.
And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer.
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
This age thinks better of a gilded fool than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school.
The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.
No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said.
We got caught reading nights with flashlights under our sheets, right? So, nobody’ll suspect an old jar of fireflies; folks’ll think it’s just a night museum.
Books were only a receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we would forget.
His destiny is in his genes. He can no more ignore this call, this summons, than he can ignore the beating of his heart. So it is with Man’s becoming more than he now is. Not Superman, assuredly, for that name has been contaminated with misuse. But a creature with a superb destiny.
Happy! Of all the nonsense.
It wouldn’t be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange, silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy. There’d be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that.
This summer night deep down under the stars was all the things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.
Walking, eh?’ said the officer. ‘Just walking?’ I nodded and waited for the obvious truth to sink in. ‘Well,’ said the officer, ‘don’t do it again!’ And the police car drove away.