The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World

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About seventy miles north of Phoenix, Nancy (my girlfriend then, eventually my wife) spots a highway sign for Arcosanti. Good Lord. I had no idea. I would have thought it too abstract for a highway sign. This way to the strangely pure yet vague accumulation of ideas toward what the future ought to look like made of sand, as it seemed to me (or sandy concrete, I suppose), back in the seventies when you d hear about it now and then, get glimpses on the news, a Sunday feature on the visionary architect Paolo Soleri and his followers who, termite-like, appeared to form those weird utopian architectural notions out of desert. I can t see anything out there but scrubby desert. We are on our way to Flagstaff, to Lowell Observatory. That s where Percival Lowell glimpsed canals on Mars a hundred and twenty years ago. His great refracting telescope, still maintained in its dome, at the time was among the largest in the world, with a twenty-four-inch objective lens by Alvan Clark and Sons, whose achromatic optics are, to this day, unexcelled. There s a famous photograph of Lowell peering through it suit and tie, his cap on backward, sitting in a simple wooden chair like a kitchen chair on a platform crankable into position along the rails of this contraption like a giant library ladder. Such an awkward and elaborate presentation of himself to the tiny eyepiece of this brontosaurian instrument angled down to him for all the world as if he were the object of inspection. As I guess he would eventually become.

We ve left the highway. I have learned to trust her instincts with regard to these departures from the path. We take a long, descending dirt road toward a scatter of undistinguished structures and storage containers, old construction equipment imperfectly hidden behind the ragged yellow plastic slats woven into a chain-link fence. I m not encouraged. But, descending a little farther to the parking lot, we see we re on the back side. Not the side for presentation. We

David Searcy is the author of Shame and Wonder, Ordinary Horror, and Last Things, and the recipient of a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Dallas and Corsicana, Texas.

Praise for David Searcy

Searcy is drawn instinctively to moments, the way parcels of time expand and contract in memory, conjuring from ordinary experience a hidden sense of all that is extraordinary in the world, in being alive. The New York Times Book Review 

Everywhere, David Searcy finds the strange and marvelous in careful examination of the quotidian. NPR 

Once you step inside David Searcy s sentences, you will not want to leave: artful, Sebald-like, they are as far-reaching as the telescope he hauled out one autumn night in Texas when he showed me the moon. . . . If you have a soul, you will love this book and Searcy s writing. LitHub 

Searcy probes moments that pulse with secret electricity. . . . I will keep thinking about the inquisitive intelligence of this book for the rest of my life. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams