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C H A p T E R 4 S T A R D U S T M E M O R I E S QuANTITATIvELy, dust refers to solid particles with diameters of less than 500 micrometers. A micrometer, also known as a micron, is a millionth of a meter, or 0.000039 of an inch. The eye of a needle is 750 microns wide, enough to get some camel dust through. The diameter of the period that ends this sentence is about 450 microns—it would make a nice little piece of dust if it could be liberated from the prison of this page. But despite its physical insignificance, dust has outsized negative connotations. It is an avatar of the unclean. It is the ensign of entropy, of buildings destroyed or neglected, matter without purpose. Dust is what gathers on books that are not read, on cabinets and shelves. It is the figure of the fragment,of division and disintegration,of the unswept, the unloved, the overlooked, and the discarded. It is what Tad Allagash snorts in his comical attempt to hoover any remaining traces of “Bolivian marching powder”—cocaine—in Jay McInerney’s 1980s novel Bright Lights, Big City. To be clear, a Buddhist saying goes, you must wipe the dust from the mirror of your mind. Much of household dust is keratin, the main protein of skin. Human skin sheds continuously.You lose about 1.5 grams of it per day.The detritus does not go entirely to waste. First, it is decomposed by fungi, who like it moist. Human flakes predigested by fungi are a staple for Dermatophagoides farinae, Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus, and Euroglyphus maynei. These mite species excrete protease enzymes that linger in 54 S T A R D u S T M E M O R I E S mattresses and furniture—until the comparatively colossal rear end of a person sits down,at which time they are released in sometimes invisible puffs. The allergenic dust is a main reason for indoor sneezing, itching, and irritated eyes. But dust ain’t all bad. Illuminated by slanting rays, it becomes pixie dust. Like a wink of the Lucretian real behind all mythology, it becomes a princess kissed by the sun.Thus,this same humble substance that piles up on bookshelves, that darkens corners and lies flat on surfaces in an apparent effort to disguise its pitiable dishevelment (and why shouldn’t it, after all, for what is dust but a debased form of dirt?), this asthmatic antithesis of the grandeur of existence, this figure of the unwanted so unremarkable it often escapes even negative attention, this forerunner of filth on the clichéd white glove of the fastidious housecleaner,this accoutrement of the homeless,this essence of crumbling,sometimes swirls and reflects, like glitter happy to be free of the mirror of our minds. A dust grain can be a world. In Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, a perspicacious elephant listens to a talking speck that turns out to be a tiny world on a grain of dust, one city of which, Whoville, contains a bustling community of humanoid Whos. I read the Seuss book to my son.It was a crash course in imaginary microbiology and crypto-anthropology , whose lesson was that within what we overlook are sometimes rich and unsuspected worlds. When I was eighteen, in 1978, I would sometimes smoke angel dust in the bleachers with the black kids at lunch. This was in L.A. My fellow students bought it sprinkled on parsley. This is a dangerous drug that can cause very bad reactions. I was lucky that, for me, it just led to pleasant numb feelings under the California sun. My father, Carl, was filming the Cosmos series for television at the time, and I was living with him and his second wife, sharing a room with their son, my seven-year-old half-brother Nick, now a successful science fiction writer. It was the first time I had lived with my father since my parents divorced when I was five. My dad let me hang out in his trailer, which had belonged to Marlon Brando, on the lot at KCET in L.A., where I would listen to punk rock on FM radio. I was from the East Coast, out of place, and had no friends to speak of. There was one girl I had my eye on, but that was about it. Blair High School was ethnically...

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