Liber Caeli - Chapter 2

Verses

Tonight the star refused to remain a star. Under greater power it showed a little disk, pale and stubborn, as though the sky had developed an eye.

I checked the glass, then my hands, then the clock. Men distrust the universe whenever it edits a textbook without permission.

Saturn had been the old fence. Beyond it, apparently, there was weather.

No trumpet announced the new world. No priest fainted at the appointed hour. A point of light merely failed to behave.

This is how large revolutions sometimes enter history: as an error in someone's notes.

I do not call the planet holy. Holiness is what frightened men name a fact before they have measured it.

Yet I confess a private awe: every map of heaven I inherited ended too early.

The telescope did not create the planet. It created our embarrassment.

What else exists because our eyes are insufficient and our confidence is not?

The old astrologers were not fools for missing Uranus. They were simply born before the necessary glass.

Remember this when mocking the ancients, and remember it again when praising the present.

A cat crossed my papers and sat directly upon the calculation. She too obscured a world until moved.

I moved the cat. I cannot move ignorance so easily.

Therefore let every certainty contain a blank margin for the next instrument.