“Charles is obsessed with the moons.” Jim took my hand. “Stars behind stars behind stars. A zillion light-years of celestial lights and he looks at the moons of Saturn.” He pulled me from the room and up a flight of circular iron stairs onto a balcony overlooking the living room. A door opened from it onto a covered porch with a telescope set up. He removed the cover and made adjustments in the lens and pulled me over close to him. He adjusted the lens again and showed me how to look through it. “That’s the universe,” he said. “We’re only a dot in all that wonder. It looks like we would learn something from that after all this time, doesn’t it?” He took my hand and held it. He was very close to me. “What can you see?”

“Infinity. It’s all so cold and far away, and beautiful. But we’re not nothing in all of that, Jim. I think our minds are very much larger than we know. Much much larger. I think our minds have the memory of everything that ever happened to the human race. Every one of us has the entire memory back to the first spark of electricity that started life. Why would we lose it? Why would we forget? Just because we didn’t always have words for it doesn’t mean that knowledge isn’t there. If it isn’t there, how can we recognize truth when scientists find it? Or writers write about it? How can we know what is true unless it’s in our brains waiting to be said. I told my English teacher at Vanderbilt that, and he said it made sense to him. Well, he said it was brilliant, to tell the truth. I shouldn’t have quit Vanderbilt. Now I’ll never finish college, I don’t guess. I’ll just have to be illiterate.”

“You aren’t illiterate. Here, let me adjust that. You can make it reach farther back in space on a night this clear.” He played with the telescope for a few minutes, then directed my head down to the opening. “See that? I don’t have names for any of that. Look at the myriads. It seems more of that light should reach us, doesn’t it? Once I dreamed it was coming our way.”