The Night Has 999 Eyes

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Preface from Unicorn Variations: This was my first mood piece, back when the world was much younger, with indebtedness to Thomas Wolfe. It's short, though.

Listen, please listen. It is important. I am here to remind you. The time has come for me to tell you again of the things you must not forget.

Sit down, please, and close your eyes. There will be pictures. Breathe deeply now. There will be odors, aromas.... There will also be tastes. If you listen closely, you will even hear other sounds within my voice....

There is a place--it is far from here in space but not in time, if you have the means--a place where there are seasons, a place where the spinning, leaning globe moves in an ellipse about its sun, and where the year winds on from a springtime to a bloom, then turns toward a harvest where the colors wrestle one another above your head and beneath your feet, meeting at last in a crisp uniformity of brown through which you walk, now walk, sniffing the life carried above the deadness by the cold, sharp morning air; and the clouds seen through the opened trees skid across the blue sheet of the sky and do not give down rains; then, moving on, there comes a time of coldness and snow, and the bark of the trees grows as hard and sharp as the tongues of files, and each step you take leaves a dark hole in a white world, and if you take a handful into your home with you it melts, leaving you water; the birds do not _wheep, threep, skree, cheep,_ as they do when the color is upon the land and themselves--they zip their feathers tight and vibrate silently upon the shelves of the evergreens; it is a pausing time between movements: The stars come on more brightly (even _this_ star--do not fear it), and the days are short and nothing really gets done but thinking (philosophy was…

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