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Postscript
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Chapter Sixteen Postscript [3.238.233.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:26 GMT) Postscript Despite my experience with nearly sixty of them, I have never yet learned how rapidly a year passes. "For a year" always sounds to me like "for keeps," and when I said "for a year and three months" that seemed very much like saying for "eternity-plus a little bit more." Now the year is gone and so too is a good part of the little bit more. While the sun was crossing the sky three hundred and sixty-five times, the stars, hurrying just a little, crossed it three hundred and sixty-six. Though somehow I had never before thought of it just this way, this is of course what happens. Because the earth goes once all the way around the sun, it adds one additional apparent revolution of the starry sphere to 257 POSTSCRIPT the three hundred and sixty-five for which its rotation is responsible. Or, as perhaps those who figure such things out would prefer to say, it reduces by one the number of apparent voyages of the sun. In either event, a given constellation comes up nearly four minutes earlier (by sun or clock time) than it did the evening before and, frighteningly enough, four minutes a day adds up to twenty-four hours in a year. Just as two clocks which do not keep the same time will nevertheless agree every so often when one has gained twelve hours over the other, so, once a year, sun time and star time are the same. A sun day is, alas, short enough, but a star day is shorter. Or would it, perhaps, be more cheerful to say that we get one more star day per year? That would at least constitute a reason which astronomers never give when defending their preference for siderial time. One of the first things I noticed when I came here was Scorpio, which is, next to Orion, the most spectacular constellation in our sky though insufficiently appreciated in New England, where it lies too low and is usually cut off by hills even if the horizon is not obscured in a haze of city lights and dust. Scorpio disappeared from my ken about the same time that the earthly scorpions hid themselves for the winter , and it does resemble them a good deal more than most constellations resemble the figures for which they are named. Now I see it again as dusk falls, 258 [3.238.233.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:26 GMT) POSTSCRIPT upright in the southeastern sky, its long tail ending in a bright, two-pointed sting and Antares gleaming an angry red in the middle of its thorax. I am told that the Papago Indians, whose reservation occupies part of my home desert, call one of the constellations The Hand of God. I imagine that it must be Scorpio because the five stars which for us represent the head might well be taken as five fingers and the long narrow body as a wrist or arm. The Indians synchronize their agricultural cycle by the appearance of God's hand in the sky, and that is a very sensible procedure since it provides, gratis, a perpetual calendar almost perfectly accurate for human purposes. In the end, to be sure, the custom might prove that ultraconservatism won't do even in such fundamental affairs, because the wobble of the earth's axis will affect even the behavior of Scorpio in the course of a few thousand years, and to assume then that its appearance meant just what it had once meant would prove disastrous. Fortunately, however, so far as this particular threat is concerned, even conservative Indians change more rapidly than the stars; long before Scorpio could prove misleading the Papago culture will have succumbed to forces pleasantly suggested in a current story about one individual long famous among the whites as a weather prophet. One day he startled some admirers by responding to 259 POSTSCRIPT the usual question about the prospects by a definitive "I don't know." Pressed for the reason behind this sudden collapse of his powers he replied briefly: "Radio broke." One may, as 1 have done, throwaway the calendar , let the clocks run down, and refuse to take in a newspaper. But as long as one looks at the sky, the passage of time will announce itself and the stars will remind one that it...