New Atlantis Read Online Free Page A

seemed to be saying something about a new continent emerging.
    “What was that?”
    “I didn’t hear,” Simon said, lying with his eyes shut and
his face pale and sweaty. I gave him two aspirins before we ate. He ate little,
and fell asleep while I was washing the dishes in the bathroom. I had been
going to practice, but a viola is fairly wakeful in a one-room apartment. I
read for a while instead. It was a best seller Janet had given me when she
left. She thought it was very good, but then she likes Franz Liszt too. I don’t
read much since the libraries were closed down, it’s too hard to get books; all
you can buy is best sellers. I don’t remember the title of this one, the cover
just said “Ninety Million Copies in Print!!!” It was about smalltown sex life
in the last century, the dear old 1970s when there weren’t any problems and
life was so simple and nostalgic. The author squeezed all the naughty thrills
he could out of the fact that all the main characters were married. I looked at
the end and saw that all the married couples shot each other after all their
children became schizophrenic hookers, except for one brave pair that divorced
and then leapt into bed together with a clear-eyed pair of government-employed
lovers for eight pages of healthy group sex as a brighter future dawned. I went
to bed then, too. Simon was hot, but sleeping quietly. His breathing was like
the sound of soft waves far away, and I went out to the dark sea on the sound
of them.
    I used to go out to the dark sea, often, as a child, falling
asleep. I had almost forgotten it with my waking mind. As a child all I had to
do was stretch out and think, “the dark sea . . . the dark sea . . .” and soon enough I’d
be there, in the great depths, rocking. But after I grew up it only happened
rarely, as a great gift. To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it,
to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it — what greater gift?
    ~
    We watched the tiny lights come
and go around us, and doing so, we gained a sense of space and of direction
— near and far, at least, and higher and lower. It
was that sense of space that allowed us to became aware of the currents. Space
was no longer entirely still around us, suppressed by the enormous pressure of
its own weight. Very dimly we were aware that the cold darkness moved, slowly,
softly, pressing against us a little for a long time, then ceasing, in a vast oscillation. The empty darkness flowed slowly
along our unmoving unseen bodies; along them, past them; perhaps through them;
we could not tell.
    Where did they come from, those dim, slow, vast tides?
What pressure or attraction stirred the deeps to these slow drifting movements?
We could not understand that; we could only feel their touch against us, but in
straining our sense to guess their origin or end, we became aware of something
else: something out there in the darkness of the great currents: sounds. We
listened. We heard.
    So our sense of space sharpened and localized to a sense
of place. For sound is local, as sight is not. Sound is delimited by silence;
and it does not rise out of the silence unless it is fairly close, both in
space and in time. Though we stand where once the singer stood we cannot hear
the voice singing; the years have carried it off on their tides, submerged it.
Sound is a fragile thing, a tremor, as delicate as life itself. We may see the
stars, but we cannot hear them. Even were the hollowness of outer space an
atmosphere, an ether that transmitted the waves of sound, we could not hear the
stars; they are too far away. At most if we listened we might hear our own sun,
all the mighty, roiling, exploding storm of its burning, as a whisper at the
edge of hearing.
    A sea wave laps one’s feet. It is the shock wave of a
volcanic eruption on the far side of the world. But one hears nothing.
    A red light flickers on the horizon. It is the reflection
in smoke of a city on the distant mainland,