(88) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where Félix discovers a letter slipped between the pages of one of his notebooks, crumpled by time, almost illegible in certain places because of the Archipelago’s sea-damp air. It will seem strange to him that he did not understand sooner what it already contained.

Letter from Lucian

My dear Félix,
I am writing to you in the middle of the night, that equivocal hour when objects seem to hesitate between their presence and their memory. The lamp illuminates my table with that magnificent poverty of tired lights which never entirely drive away the shadows, but instead compose with them a kind of silent treaty. The drawings lie here before me. I have turned some of them face-down against the wall, as one sometimes turns the portraits of the dead when their gaze becomes too persistent. And yet… it is as though they continue to watch me.
I am beginning to believe that there are figures which continue their work even after one ceases to look at them.
You will smile at that phrase, and you will be right to do so. It possesses that almost theatrical excess you sometimes reproach me for. But I assure you that I speak here with the utmost seriousness.
For some time now I have been reflecting upon that old idea of Newton’s, later taken up by Herschel: the vera causa.
The expression haunts me.
I believe it is misunderstood when science is reduced to a cold mechanism. The great scientists were often men pursued by an almost poetic intuition of the hidden unity of the world. Newton himself resembled less an accountant of the stars than a prophet enclosed within an observatory.
What he sought was not a convenient explanation. Convenient explanations swarm like insects around lamps. They are born each day. They die each evening. No. He sought a cause sufficiently real to leave its mark upon several regions of the world at once. That is what distinguishes a true cause from a mere intellectual invention: its overflow. A fragile hypothesis remains imprisoned within the problem that produced it. It resembles those prisoners who pace their cells until the stone is worn away beneath their own footsteps. But the true cause travels. One encounters it elsewhere. It appears where no one expected it.
Suddenly it explains the tides after explaining apples… then the planets… then comets… then phenomena still unknown at the very moment it was conceived. It acts like those great underground rivers whose course the whole earth slowly learns.
I sometimes wonder whether certain human figures possess a similar power. Not ordinary persons. I am speaking of figures in the ancient sense of the word. Inner forms. Presences capable of secretly organizing a multitude of scattered facts.
Thus certain beings enter a life as minor events. Then their influence gradually extends into unforeseen regions. They modify the dreams of others. Their language contaminates sentences that no longer belong to them. They shift the invisible centers of gravity of the lives around them.