THE TINY BEE THAT HOVERS AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

Mapping the geography of longing.

“We are lost,” essayist Searcy writes in his luminous collection of meditations and explorations. “We’re neither here nor there. There’s you, and there’s the you that knows there’s you. And in that gap between the two—and we are always in that gap—we’re migratory.” The author’s migrations take him from his backyard telescope to the massive Lowell Observatory, from his childhood in Dallas, where he roamed the alleys around his house, to Arizona, where he traveled to Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s earthy, futuristic village. A few miles from the Meteor Crater—a “mere exhilaration,” in his estimation—he visited a makeshift museum set up by a former professor of biology, where, through an “empty, ruined window,” he saw a tiny bee floating, absolutely still: “It holds that space in place, the way some hovering insects do as if obedient to, in reference to, some universal center.” For Searcy, that magical stillness can emerge from old photographs, from his own subconscious, from air itself. “The air, the empty air, is full of meaning,” he writes. “Did you know that the dapples of sunlight under a tree are blurred and overlapping images of the sun? Not just the wash of light, like water, leaking through. But actual photographic images—a repetitious murmuring.” Telescopes, cameras, and the strange instrument known as the Claude glass become propitious devices for discovery. The Claude glass, a tinted, slightly convex mirror popular among late-18th and early-19th-century tourists, was designed “to have you turn away from what you wish to study. A device precisely for averted vision” that seemed to make nature’s sublimity “more acceptable, more picturesque.” Seeing slant, for Searcy as for Emily Dickinson, can be revelatory. In lyrical, tender prose, Searcy recalls cherished friends, family memories (a troubled daughter haunts some pieces), and capricious travels through place and time in search of wonder.

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Memorable, melancholy, elegiac journeys.