For months I'd been poring over the Edmund Scientific catalog, wondering what miracles I might discover with an underwater viewer ("It floats!"), or 500 tongue depressors ("For lab use only"), or a DNA isolation kit ("Contains 5 pipettes!"). And then I saw it: the International Standard Full-Size Student Microscope.

My thoughts flew to the mystery-bugs on my squash plants; to the innumerable cat whiskers embedded in the rug; to the various and vexing skin rashes I may suffer in the coming years. With a microscope, I figured, I could look at these things coldly, in the hard light of empirical inspection. I could see what the heck was going on. I could KNOW stuff.

The microscope was a hundred and fifty dollars. I read and re-read the catalog description. I thought. I agonized. I wanted. I added it to the stew of material objects that I desire, that cost more than a hundred dollars. At that moment, the stew included: a ten-inch telescope; a printer; a VCR; a car stereo; a rock-hunting kit; a decent camera; and now a microscope. I call this concoction Priority Stew. It boils and roils in my brain twenty-four hours a day as I re-order the ingredients, ranking each unbought item from most desirable to least desirable, then cross-indexing them from most important to least important. It's a complex stew, and as a result, I end up buying very few of these things. But once in a while an object pops to the surface. It took the microscope about a week to boil up -- record time. And once it did, it wouldn't sink back down. So I bought it.

A week later, it arrived. I got back to my office after lunch, and there it was on my desk: a cardboard box the size of a springer spaniel, with the tasteful white Edmund Scientific label affixed just-so over the water-smooth packing tape. I stood there and rested one hand on the box, letting all the breath go out of me. I didn't feel the need to breathe in for a minute or so. I could hardly think, I was so excited. The afternoon seemed impossibly long -- a Gobi Desert of meaningless work, devoid of landmarks, before I could finally go home and rip open that box. Thereafter, I felt sure, life would begin.

By the time I got home that evening, I'd regained some composure. I had the presence of mind to feed and entertain the cats before sitting down on the carpet with the big box and slitting it oh-so-carefully with an open scissors down one long side. I disinterred the beige-and-black, rack-and-pinioned, ballast-heavy machine from its plastic peanuts and protective bag. I cleared a spot on the kitchen table and set it down. I popped in the removable eyepiece, unboxed the slides and slide covers, and got down to some serious science.

The instruction manual suggested I start with paper, so I found a few postage stamps and photographs, envelopes and magazine clippings. One by one, I popped them under the scope. They all were infinitely cool. The textures and colors were staggering. The violent landscape of a torn postage stamp just blew my mind. Such a forest of detail in every object! Such filaments and fibers everywhere at hand! I suddenly wished I were very small, one of those shiny-suited submariners in "Fantastic Voyage." Here was a new frontier, or frontiers inside of frontiers, ever smaller, each as ornate as the last. I felt lost in the old Morton-Salt paradox: the little girl walking, spilling salt from the Morton's can printed with a smaller picture of her walking, spilling salt from a Morton's can printed with a smaller . . . and back to infinity.

But I shook off thoughts of the infinite, and got back to the business of now. I gathered small objects from around the house, and under the scope they went. Seashells were surprisingly smooth. Felt-tip pens were disgusting -- wet, furry tongues in black and blue. A hairpin looked like a crude iron beam for hanging pots over an open fire. A small, dead leaf looked like -- well, a small, dead leaf. I felt like I'd seen that one before, probably on PBS.

Then I screwed up my courage and fetched the big game: a dead fly that had been lying on my living-room carpet for about a week. I'd been saving it. I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, having seen pictures of flies up close, but still, it was a revelation. The first thing I saw were the eyes -- big, bulbous soufflés formed from hundreds (thousands?) of tiny, perfectly joined black discs. Every other part of its body was hairy -- big, black, coarse hairs all over everything. And the wings! Translucent panels like fine sails stretched between black, veined cords lined with spiky hairs. And the claws -- two (or three; I couldn't quite tell) huge, curved claws at the end of each leg. Surely they can climb up anything.

Occasionally, something in my stomach hovered between vertigo and nausea, and I had to look away, close my eyes for a moment, take a breath. Caught in the black hairs of the fly's back were what I assumed to be dust specks -- little yellow-white spheres -- and that just grossed me out. I still get the willies even thinking about it. I kept expecting to see microscopic worms chewing away at it, poor thing. It had, after all, been dead for a week. But I didn't see anything crawling on it. Still, the sight of that hairy, formidable, alien-looking thing proved to be too much after a while, and my head and stomach couldn't take it any more. I took the body out to the yard and gave it a decent burial. It seemed impolite, somehow, all this inspecting and marveling at the flesh of this creature that had been unlucky enough to die in my living room.

That was when I began to get a sense that with knowledge comes a burden; that the acquisition of knowledge bears a price. It was more complicated than just picking up something and saying, "Wow!" It slightly altered my place in the universe. I was wiser, but perhaps not better, for the experience. I kept thinking that maybe detachment just takes practice, like being an undertaker. But the regret, I think, has to be part of the equation. What good are our big brains if they don't let us contemplate what might be? Like a universe in which no one dies; no one is helpless under the microscope; no one has yellowish spheres stuck to his back. A universe of the beautiful and the ugly, in which we know that they are one and the same, part and parcel, the up and the down in the great disorientation of space.

I'd found what I was after. I wasn't so much knowledge, after all; it was thoughts. New thoughts. Like the Morton Salt girl, there I was, receding and receding in the blue field of an ever-growing box, swirling in the Priority Stew of the universe, in which everything is important, everything is desirable. And the more you look, the more it is so.

Amy Miller can be reached at amymca@earthlink.net. She's discovered that cat whiskers look just like electrical wires.