SOMETHING ABOUT THE SKY

Reflections on clouds and other wonders of our atmospheric “ocean.”

“This is a book for wonderers,” McClure accurately notes in her illustrator’s afterword. Originally written as a script for a children’s television show in 1956 and unpublished until 2021, Carson’s quietly eloquent essay offers a stirring mix of natural observations and insights. Our planet has two mighty oceans, she points out, both necessary for life. We live at the bottom of the one made of air, beneath clouds—described as “the writing of the wind on the sky”—that are born and die. After detailing the broad types—foggy stratus, flat-bottomed cumulus, and high-altitude cirrus—and the messages they convey in their distinctive forms and compositions, she concludes that the ocean of air, like the watery one, is still full of mysteries…but we are “learning to read the language of the sky.” Using sumi ink and washi paper with cut-paper overlays, the illustrator creates misty, evocative cloudscapes behind and above views of seas and mountains in various weathers and seasons, as well as spare glimpses of human figures diverse in terms of age, with skin the color of the page, mostly with inward gazes. Overall, the effect is solemn, stately…bound to leave readers in a meditative mood.

Contemplative and stirring—definitely for wonderers.