“Yes⁠—and yet not just the same either. You have to take humanity as it is; but even so I find it magnificent. I like to think about the Chaldeans when I lie and look at the planets they were familiar with⁠—for, clever as they were, they did not know them all. But the ones they did not know I cannot see either. Uranus was only recently discovered, by means of the telescope⁠—a hundred and twenty years ago.”

“You call that recently?”

“I call it recently⁠—with your kind permission⁠—in comparison with the three thousand years since their time. But when I lie and look at the planets, even the three thousand years get to seem ‘recently,’ and I begin to think quite intimately of the Chaldeans, and how in their time they gazed at the stars and made verses on them—and all that is humanity too.”

“I must say, you have very tall ideas in your head.”