In a time when young people's impatience with the old and old people's impatience with the young have reached their peak, when the old do nothing but store up arguments with which to tell the young finally what they deserve and when the young are waiting only for these occasions in order to show the old that they understand nothing, Mr. Palomar is unable to utter a word. If he sometimes tries to speak up, he realizes that all are too intent on the theses they are defending to pay any attention to what he is trying to clarify for himself.

The fact is that he would like not so much to affirm a truth of his own as to ask questions, and he realizes that no one wants to abandon the train of his own discourse to answer questions that, coming from another discourse, would necessitate rethinking the same things with other words, perhaps ending up on strange ground, far from safe paths. Or else he would like others to ask him questions; but he, too, would want only certain questions and not others: the ones he would answer by saying the things he feels he can say but could say only if someone asked him to say them. In any event, nobody has the slightest idea of asking him anything.

In this situation Mr. Palomar confines himself to brooding privately on the difficulty of speaking to the young.

He thinks: "The difficulty lies in the fact that between us and them there is an unbridgeable gap. Something has happened between our generation and theirs, a continuity of experience has been broken: we no longer have any common reference points."

Then he thinks: "No, the difficulty lies in the fact that every time I am about to reproach or criticize or exhort or advise them, I think that as a young person I also attracted reproaches, criticism, exhortation, advice of the same sort, and I never listened to any of it. Times were different and as a result there were many differences in behavior, language, customs; but my mental processes then were not very different from theirs today. So I have no authority to speak."

Mr. Palomar vacillates at length between these two views of the question. Then he decides: "There is no contradiction between the two positions. The break between the generations derives from the impossibility of transmitting experience, of saving others from making the mistakes we have already made. The real distance between two generations is created by the elements they have in common, which require the cyclical repetition of the same experiences, as in the biologically inherited behavior of animal species. The differences between us and them, on the contrary, are the result of the irreversible changes that every period evolves; and these differences are the result of the historical legacy that we have handed on to them, the true legacy for which we are responsible, even if unconsciously sometimes. This is why we have nothing to teach: we can exert no influence on what most resembles our own experience; in what bears our own imprint we are unable to recognize ourselves."

After a series of intellectual misadventures not worth recalling, Mr. Palomar has decided that his chief activity will be looking at things from the outside. A bit nearsighted, absent-minded, introverted, he does not seem to belong temperamentally to that human type generally called an observer. And yet it has always happened that certain things--a stone wall, a seashell, a leaf, a teapot--present themselves to him as if asking him for minute and prolonged attention: he starts observing them almost unawares, and his gaze begins to run over all the details and is then unable to detach itself. Mr. Palomar has decided that from now on he will redouble his attention: first, by not allowing these summons to escape him as they arrive from things; second, by attributing to the observer's operation the importance it deserves.

At this point he faces his first critical moment: sure that from now on the world will reveal to him an infinite wealth of things, Mr. Palomar tries staring at everything that comes within eyeshot; he feels no pleasure, and he stops. A second phase follows, in which he is convinced that only some things are to be looked at, others not, and he must go and seek the right ones. To do this, he has to face each time problems of selection, exclusion, hierarchies of preference; he soons realizes he is spoiling everything, as always when he involves his own ego and all the problems he has with his own ego.

But how can you look at something and set your own ego aside? Whose eyes are doing the looking? As a rule, you think of the ego as one who is peering out of your own eyes as if leaning on a window sill, looking at the world stretching out before him in all its immensity. So, then: a window looks out on the world. The world is out there; and in here, what do we have? The world still--what else could there be? With a little effort of concentration, Mr. Palomar manages to shift the world from in front of him and set it on the sill, looking out. Now, beyond the windows, what do we have? The world is also there, and for the occasion has been split into a looking world and a world looked at. And what about him, also known as "I," namely Mr. Palomar? Is he not a piece of the world that is looking at another piece of the world? Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the "I," the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world. To look at itself the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr. Palomar.

So, from now on Mr. Palomar will look at things from outside and not from inside. But this is not enough: he will look at them with a gaze that comes from outside, not inside, himself. He tries to perform the experiment at once: now it is not he who is looking; it is the world of outside that is looking outside. Having established this, he casts his gaze around, expecting a general transfiguration. No such thing. The usual quotidian grayness surrounds him. Everything has to be rethought from the beginning. Having the outside look outside is not enough: the trajectory must start from the looked-at thing, linking it with the thing that looks.

From the mute distance of things a sign must come, a summons, a wink: one thing detaches itself from the other things with the intention of signifying something . . . what? Itself, a thing is happy to be looked at by other things only when it is convinced that it signifies itself and nothing else, amid things that signify themselves and nothing else.

Opportunities of this kind are not frequent, to be sure; but sooner or later they will have to arise: it is enough to wait for one of those lucky coincidences to occur when the world wants to look and be looked at in the same instant and Mr. Palomar happens to be going by. Or, rather, Mr. Palomar does not even have to wait, because these things happen only when you are not awaiting them.

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 intermitten flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.