For example, in the telescope Mars proves to be a more perplexed planet than it appears to the naked eye: it seems to have many things to communicate and can bring only a small portion of them into focus, as in a stammered, coughing speech. A scarlet halo protrudes around the edge; you can try to tuck it in by regulating the screw, to emphasize the crust of ice of the lower pole; spots appear and vanish on the surface like clouds or rents in clouds; one becomes stabilized in the shape and position of Australia, and Mr. Palomar is convinced that the more clearly he sees that Australia, the more the lens is focused; but at the same time he realizes that he is losing other shadows of things that he thought he saw or felt obliged to see.
In other words, it seems to him that if Mars is the planet about which, ever since the days of Schiaparelli, so many things have been said, causing alternate illusions and disappointments, this fact coincides with the difficulty of establishing relations with the planet, as with a person of difficult character. (Unless the difficulty of character is all on Mr. Palomar's side: he tries in vain to escape subjectivity by taking refuge among the celestial bodies.)
Quite the opposite is the relationship he establishes with Saturn, the most exciting planet to the person viewing it through a telescope: there it is, very sharp, white, the outlines of the sphere precise and of the ring; a faint zebra striping marks the sphere; a darker circumference distinguishes the edge of the ring. This telescope hardly picks up any other details and accentuates the geometrical abstraction of the object; the sense of an extreme difference, rather than diminishing, becomes more prominent now than it is to the naked eye.
It is cheering to think that an object so different from all others, a form that achieves the maximum strangeness with the maximum simplicity and regularity and harmony, is rotating in the sky.
"If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now," Mr. Palomar thinks, "they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see. "