QUIDDITY 90
It Became More Than That; Meanderings, Hypatia's Bookroom
It Became More than That
From the time she was 15 until her passing, writing was an ever-present influencer in Leah Napolin’s life. Writing provided her with the platform to observe and comment on the events and people that were consequential in her world, - from the minute to the universal, from YENTL to THE DOGS OF PRYPIAT. Future issues of QUIDDITY will provide you with the opportunity to become familiar with some of her insights. **********
Celestial Mechanics
A Short Story by Leah Napolin
Part 1
When asked about her “boyfriend,” Jade related a complex history that was illustrated the night of the fire.
Antonio arrived at seven with a bottle of Pinot Grigio in one hand and a large box in the other. “Surprise!” he says and places the box on my coffee table by the window.
My apartment is—well, small would be an understatement. If you stood in the center of the room and stretched out your arms you could practically touch the walls on either side. In Paris it would be called a garret. Here, nothing quite so romantic, but the view from the windows that open onto my tiny balcony—ah, that’s something else! Twenty-third floor, southwest exposure. It looks out over buildings gilded by the sunset. It looks out over rooftops to the river, flowing like molten copper in the sunset.
I’m curious about the box. “Go on, open it,” Antonio urges me.
Antonio is my lover. He has olive skin and straight black hair which he sometimes draws back and fastens out of the way when he’s working. I like to watch him when he’s working, and even when he’s not. There’s an intensity about him, whether in motion or repose, which I find tremendously exciting.
While I undo the wrappings on the box, Antonio uncorks the wine and carries it back to the table, along with two wine glasses carelessly dangled by their stems. When he sits down next to me on the couch, his leg brushes against mine and I can feel the heat of his skin through the linen fabric of his trousers.
“Well, what do you think?” he asks.
In the box is a telescope. Antonio is a photographer. He relates to the world in a visual way, which is what first drew us together. We met in front of Rubens’ Leda and the Swan, a seventeenth-century homage to Michaelangelo, on loan from the Uffizi to the Met. I’d been sketching, my yellow crayon poised as I stopped to study the play of light and shadow on the serpentine neck of the swan. It was cradled between Leda’s breasts while his bill reached for her mouth. I was studying the snowy white of the swan’s stiffened wing against the flesh of Leda’s thigh as he stroked her sex. Suddenly, I felt someone’s eyes on me. I turned around. It was Antonio, brazenly looking over my shoulder.
Ah, “the feathered glory—” he said, quoting Yeats.
“Yes, but she didn’t consent.”
“She didn’t have to. Gods have their way with us.”
Normally, I would have thought him rude and said so, but when you sketch in public people are always watching. Eventually, I came to regard his curiosity as an essential part of him, one that would lead us both to the threshold of new experiences.
I examine the contents of the box. “A telescope?”
He sees my puzzled expression and laughs. “I thought we might stay in tonight and do some star-gazing.”
“I didn’t know you liked astronomy.”
“Oh, I do--“he replies. “You’d be surprised at some of the heavenly bodies one sees!”
We sip our wine while the sun sinks farther behind the city and the shadows lengthen. I’ve loaded the CD player and the strains of Vivaldi float out into the dusk. Deftly, Antonio assembles the telescope, attaches the tube and focusing rack to one of his tripods and sets it up on the balcony. He talks to me about optics and the curvature of light. Fascinated as always, I watch the way his hands move, so strong and capable, with elegant dark fingers and immaculate nails. Sometimes all it takes for me to feel the first stirrings of desire is a glimpse of his hands. We have been together fifteen months and are still very much in love, but the passion—well, lately the passion’s been different. I’ve heard that with time passion cools, or sometimes seeks other, less familiar channels.
When Antonio arrived we embraced as usual, but it was not the embrace I’ve come to expect; there was something held back. Now he sprawls casually among the pillows of the couch, shirt unbuttoned, and I can tell even in the humid semi-darkness that his eyes are on me. After a while, he reaches out a hand to caress the nape of my neck and draw me to him.
At last! How calm he seems, yet I sense something more. If only I could see his eyes, I might be able to know what he’s feeling.
Of all the mouths I have kissed, none equals Antonio’s. His lips are full and shapely, his tongue dexterous but never rude. With those lips he is able to summon up the subtlest of sensations. As I recline in his lap our kisses are effortless. There is no hurry, no urgency. He tastes of wine and oranges. The strings of the Vivaldi sigh and quiver, a mild breeze comes through the open windows, welcome as rain after a prolonged dry spell. The moon appears.
“Hey-hey,” says Antonio, “the Queen of the Night! Come, look!”
He leads me by the hand out onto the balcony where I am invited to peer through the telescope. There, framed in the field of view, is that celestial body that illuminates our dreams, but closer than I’ve ever seen. Magnified tenfold. Ten to the one-hundredth power.
“When you look at something you take possession of it,” whispers Antonio, his breath warm on the back of my neck, “but without coercion, without violence. Let the moon be our first conquest tonight.”
The moon. He speaks of it as a female. Waxing and waning in cycles. With one hand resting at the small of my back he talks of periodicity, and by this I know he means the lunar, tidal force that moves not only oceans but the blood within my womb. The sound of his voice, contemplative yet tinged with wonder, thrills me, and I feel a sudden moisture between my thighs.
The moon. He talks about her as a lover would. Yet this ancient divinity has the skin of a hag, pock-marked with rills and clefts, faults and domes. If she were smooth, he would quickly tire of her. Wrinkled, her mystery deepens. Dazzled by light, which is only light cast back from that other orb, her heavenly consort, he names for me her features, and all at once Latin is the langue of eros. “Mare Vaporum, Mare Tranquillitatis, Mare Serenitatis—“ Sea of Vapours, Sea of Tranquillity, Sea of Serenity.
“When you look at something, you possess it,” he says, and in a husky voice whispers my name: “Jade,” he says, “Jade—“
“Or, it takes possession of you,” I murmur. (end of part 1)
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MEANDERINGS: “Tittle”
The answer on a recent Jeopardy episode was “The little known term for the dot above the letters “i” and “j.” The correct question was “What is TITTLE?” Believe it or not, a contestant knew that word. How many people do you know who could pick their brain and come up with “tittle?” I grew up thinking that “little dot” was the actual term given in the dictionary. As an native English speaker and teacher, if anyone, for god knows what reason, ever had the occasion to ask me what that thing was, my reply would have been “little dot.” Given today’s zeitgeist, answering “tittle” would most likely be followed with giggles or a rebuke for “sexualizing everything.”
I don’t remember the rest of the show. I was too busy remembering Sister Mary Steven, my old, high school English teacher, with her back to us holding a piece of chalk holstered in an aluminum sheath and about to write something on the board.
“Now, girls, you know that to make certain a new word becomes part of your own vocabulary, you must enunciate it three times and use it correctly in a sentence.”
With a combined flourish of white on black, she prints in large, block letters QUOTIDIAN, slowly pronouncing it as if she were a dictionary.
“kwoh—tit—ee—en.”
“Let’s say it together,” she cheerleads as she turns around to us. “Say it together with me, girls.”
Imagine twenty-one blue-uniformed girls, each yearning “to breathe free” of her sexual repression, smirking at each other and chanting loudly and slowly.
“Kwooooh —- TIIIIIT——- eeeee—- eennnnnn.”
We do this two more times, each time more slowly, each time Sister Mary Steven directing us as if we were a chorus, all the while never aware of her part in this school girls sex play.
We, then, take out our notebooks, date the newest entry and write an original sentence using the newest addition to our vocabulary section. Oh, yes. I can still recall that sentence: The black knight wore a quotidian breastplate made of lowly wrought iron. (For those thinking, “Oh, really?” We were in the middle of reading excerpts from Ivanhoe. Sir Walter Scott’s novel about King Richard the Lionhearted and his knights.) I like that word so much that for months I scour for opportunities to use it. It makes this sixteen-year-old feel both smart and sexy.
Today, if she had watched that Jeopardy show, my blue-uniformed smart-aleck self would have written: The black knight wore a quotidian breastplate unexpectedly decorated with the word justice topped with gold tittles. &
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HYPATIA’S BOOKROOM
A New Kind of Library
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library.” –Jorge Luis Borges
QUIDDITY, is building its own library of books that are of importance to us--intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, ethically, etc.-- books that we would definitely rescue from a trash pile. We’re calling it Hypatia's Bookroom after the chief librarian of the ancient library of Alexandria. Tell us the title, author, category, and why this book is important to you. Questions you might consider include: Would you read this book again? Would you gift it to someone (who, why)? What note would you write on the cover page?
On the shelves so far: The rescued books selected by readers has grown and takes up too much space to list them all here. You can peruse the entire listing by going to the BLOG section of my website at blmurphy.com.
"There are so very many books, and we have forgotten almost all of them." (Lit.Hub) May we save all we can.
Kafka’s ideal of what a book should be: “An ax for the frozen sea within us.” (Sigrid Nuez interview in “By the Book,” NYT Book Review, 12/10/23)
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For your information:
For an interesting and thought-provoking point of view, consider an article in a recent issue of Literary Hub titled Books Aren’t Magic Empathy Pills (But They Help), by Maris Kreizman on the importance of standing up for literature.
Take a deep breath and stifle your “Are they f—-ing serious!” reaction. Take a look at Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship. PEN laments and warns “A growing list of words and materials is being scrubbed from government websites and documents and flagged for review by federal agencies in an attempt by the Trump administration to remove all references not only to diversity, equity and inclusion, but also to climate change, vaccines, and a host of other topics.”
AND…
* International Literacy Day (Sept. 8), kicking off a month-long campaign by the International Literacy Association to affirm literacy as a human right and a driver of equity and justice. (https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-now/2025/07/08/every-page-has-a-purpose-international-literacy-day-2025)
* Banned Books Week 2025 (Oct. 5–11), culminating in a national day of action on Let Freedom Read Day (Oct. 11). [https://bannedbooksweek.org/]
* Everyday Advocacy Playbook by NCTE : The Playbook is designed to be accessible for both individual educators and teams of teachers, librarians, and parents who are determined to support children’s right to read.