Mr. Palomar suffers greatly because of his difficulty in establishing relations with his fellow man. He envies people who have the gift of always finding the right thing to say, the right greeting for everyone; people who are at ease with anyone they happen to encounter and put others at their ease; who move easily among people and immediately understand when they must defend themselves and keep their distance or when they can win trust and affection; who give their best in their relations with others and make others want to give their best; who know at once how to evaluate a person with regard to themselves and on an absolute scale.
"These gifts, " Mr. Palomar thinks with the regret of the man who lacks them, "are granted to those who live in harmony with the world. It is natural for them to establish an accord not only with people but also with things, places, situations, occasions, with the course of the constellations in the firmament, with the aggregation of atoms in molecules. That avalanche of simultaneous events that we call the universe does not overwhelm the lucky individual who can slip through the finest interstices among the infinite combinations, permutations, chains of consequences, avoiding the paths of the murderous meteorites and catching only the beneficent rays. To the man who is the friend of the universe, the universe is a friend. If only," Mr. Palomar sighs, "I could be like that."
He decides to try to imitate such people. All his efforts, from now on, will be directed toward achieving a harmony both with the human race, his neighbor, and with the most distant spiral of the system of the galaxies. To begin with, since he has too many problems with his neighbor, Mr. Palomar will try to improve his relations with the universe. He avoids and reduces to a minimum his associations with his similars; he grows accustomed to making his mind blank, expelling all indiscreet presences; he observes the sky on starry nights; he reads books on astronomy; he becomes familiar with the notion of sidereal spaces until this becomes a permanent piece in his mental furniture. Then he tries to make his thoughts retain simultaneously the nearest things and the farthest: when he lights his pipe he is intent on the flame of the match that at his next puff should allow itself to be drawn to the bottom of the bowl, initiating the slow transformation of shreds of tobacco into embers; but this attention must not make him forget even for a moment the explosion of a supernova taking place in the Large Magellanic Cloud at this same instant (that is to say, a few million years ago). The idea that everything in the universe is connected and corresponds never leaves him: a variation in the brightness of the Crab nebula or the condensation of a globular mass in Andromeda cannot help having some influence on the functioning of his record player or on the freshness of the watercress leaves in his salad bowl.
When he is convinced that he has precisely outlined his own place in the midst of the silent expanse of things floating in the void, amid the dust cloud of present or possible events that hovers in space and time, Mr. Palomar decides the moment has come to apply this cosmic wisdom to relations with his fellows. He hastens to return to society, renews acquaintances, friendships, business associations; he subjects his ties and affections to a careful examination of conscience. He expects to see, extending before him, a human landscape that is finally distinct, clear, without mists, where he will be able to move with precise and confident gestures. Is this what happens? Not at all. He starts by becoming embroiled in a muddle of misunderstandings, hesitations, compromises, blunders; the most futile matters stir up anguish, the most serious lose their point; everything he says or does proves clumsy, jarring, irresolute. What is it that does not work?
This: contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found. In dealing with another person everyone should know where to place himself with regard to that person, should be sure of the reaction the other's presence inspires -- dislike or attraction, dominion or subjugation, discipleship or mastery, performance as actor or as spectator -- and on the basis of it and its counterreaction he should then establish the rules of the game to be applied in their play, the moves and countermoves to be made. But for all this, even before he starts observing the others, he should know well who he is himself. Knowledge on one's fellow has this special aspect: it passes necessarily through knowledge of oneself; and this is precisely what Mr. Palomar is lacking. Not only knowledge is needed, but also comprehension, agreement with one's own means and ends and impulses, which implies a mastery over one's own inclinations and actions that will control and direct them but not coerce or stifle them. The people he admires for the rightness and naturalness of their every word and every action are not only at peace with the universe but, first of all, at peace with themselves. Mr. Palomar, who does not love himself, has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face; this is why he preferred to take refuge among the galaxies; now he understands that he should have begun by finding inner peace. The universe can perhaps go tranquilly about its business; he surely cannot.
The only way still open to him is self-knowledge; from now on he will explore his own inner geography, he will draw the diagram of the moods of his spirit, he will derive from it formulas and theories, he will train his telescope on the orbits traced by the course of his life rather than on those of the constellations. "We can know nothing about what is outside us if we overlook ourselves," he thinks now. "The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves."
And thus this new phase of his itinerary in search of wisdom is also achieved. Finally his gaze can rove freely inside himself. What will he see? Will his inner world seem to him an immense, calm rotation of a luminous spiral? Will he see stars and planets navigating in silence on the parabolas and ellipses that determine character and destiny? Will he contemplate a sphere of infinite circumference that has the ego as its center and its center in every point?
He opens his eyes. What appears to his gaze is something he seems to have seen already, every day: streets full of people, hurrying, elbowing their way ahead, without looking one another in the face, among high walls, sharp and peeling. In the background, the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.