Liber Plutonis - Chapter 2

Verses

Verse 11

The plate showed a speck that moved while the fixed stars kept their appointments. I circled it twice because one circle felt like superstition.

Verse 12

We had searched for a giant and found a small cold stranger. The universe has never signed our specifications.

Verse 13

They named it Pluto, partly for the underworld and partly because the first two letters pleased the memory of Percival Lowell. Even gods inherit paperwork.

Verse 14

At that distance the Sun is no golden lord. It is a brilliant star among darkness, still authoritative but no longer intimate.

Verse 15

I do not worship what I discover. A thing becomes no less marvelous when it fails to require kneeling.

Verse 16

Later they found Charon, almost scandalously large beside it, and the lonely world became a pair revolving around emptiness.

Verse 17

There is a lesson there if one insists on lessons: two bodies may belong to one dance without either standing at the center.

Verse 18

Its year is longer than a human biography. Empires can rise, revise their flags, and vanish before Pluto completes one circuit.

Verse 19

Men argued whether it was a planet. Pluto continued around the Sun with the grave patience of something unimpressed by committees.

Verse 20

Classification is useful, but no category has ever exerted gravity.

Verse 21

A dwarf world is not a failed large world any more than a cat is a failed horse.

Verse 22

The edge of the system became crowded once our instruments improved. Ignorance had mistaken loneliness for fact.

Verse 23

I once thought discovery enlarged mankind. Now I suspect it mostly enlarges the inventory of things that do not need us.

Verse 24

Write that in the margin: the dark beyond Neptune was not empty; our map was.