The moon
In one of Shelly's famous fragments, the moon is a dying lady lean and pale; in another, a joyless eye. She is amnesiac, in Eliot's Rhapsody, redolent of dust and eau de cologne and twisting a paper rose; in Shakespeare, a thief, who steals her pale fire from the sun, and in Coleridge, cursed and horned, and in Joyce, a silver hoop buried in grey sand, and in Nabokov, a translucent nail pairing in a pink waste of sky. We may recall Proust's curiosa felicitas to the "unalterable splendor of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene," but we know she is something else again in Keats, in Borges, Wordsworth, Frost, Donne, Blake... The length of this catalogue is limited only by one's reading; it could be virtually infinite. But what is the moon to the man who sees it after having read all these books, is moved by it, and dares to think of expressing himself in words? It is the stony eye of a riddling sphinx, luminously staring him into silence and despair.
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