even*cleveland: comet diamonds

comet diamonds

The Camelopdalids meteor shower was a bit of a bust, but in a random search for starry matter in the wilds of the internet, I discovered comet-themed jewelry.

Advances in astronomy in the 1700s and 1800s lead to the discovery of many new comets, and in 1835 and 1910 Halley's Comet made spectacular appearances, feeding comet-fever and inspiring jewelers to create asymmetrical brooches that evoked the comet's head and tail. I love the idea of collecting a piece or two.

I hope to see Halley's Comet again; when I saw it in 1986, there was an elderly lady there who told me she had seen it as a little girl. If I am around when it returns in 2061, the old lady will be me.

Read more about comet jewelry here + here.

Pictured:

19th century comet pin, at Erie Basin.

1986 Halley's Comet pin, found here.

c. 1910 Halley's Comet pin, at Robin's Nest Midwest.

Comet brooch, at JeanJeanVintage.

Related: my favorite astronomer, Caroline Herschel, who "swept the sky" and was the first woman to discover a comet. You can read more about her remarkable story (and her remarkable brother William) in Richard Holmes' delightful The Age of Wonder (highly recommended).

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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