Clouds drift ephemeral across the dome of this world, carrying eternity — condensing molecules that animated the first breath of life, coursing with electric charges that will power the last thought.

To me, a cloud will always be a spell against indifference — a little bloom of wonder to remind us that everything changes yet everything holds.

Two centuries after the amateur meteorologist Luke Howard classified the clouds with Goethe’s aid and two generations after Rachel Carson composed her lyrical serenade to the science of the sky, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of Cloud Appreciation Society (of which I am a pin-wearing member), and artist William Grill bring us Cloudspotting for Beginners (public library) — an illustrated field guide to the science and splendor of the sky, and an ode to the human longing for pattern, for order, for an organizing principle that gives coherence to the chaos of life.

It can be hard to give an artistic interpretation of something so naturally beguiling, so replete with raw wonder, but under Grill’s color pencil, clouds take on an even more whimsical quality, gentle as a child’s song, unhurried as a daydream.

With the plain-worded playfulness of a children’s book and the concise authority of an encyclopedia, the book covers the ten main cloud types — from the rough-hewn patchwork of Stratocumulus, commonest because it forms over the oceans that cover most of our planet’s surface, to Cirrocumulus, the rarest cloud of all and the most ephemeral.

Beyond the main ten, there is the subgroup of special cloud types, from the aerial waves of Undulatus to the spaceship of Lenticularis.

Among them is a touching triumph of citizen science — Asperitas, a cloud species identified and named by members of the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2009 and, with Pretor-Pinney’s advocacy, officially affirmed by the World Meteorological Organization in 2017.

Opening beyond the cloud types is a cabinet of atmospheric curiosities — cloud iridescence, sundogs (which inspired Hilma af Klint), glories (which were central to the discovery of cosmic rays), clouds on other planets, thunder and lightning on our own, crepuscular rays.

Pretor-Pinney details one of the great dramas of this world, which Coleridge saw as a singular portal to the soul:

Inside a storm cloud, the ice crystals bump into one another as they are blown around by violent air currents. Each time hail and ice crystals collide, the larger pieces of ice pick up negative electric charge from smaller ones, which instead become positively charged. This electric charge is like the one you feel when you rub a balloon.

The larger, heavier pieces of ice fall through the cloud’s rising air currents toward its base while the smaller, lighter ice crystals are wafted up toward the top. This is how separate parts of the Cumulonimbus become negatively and positively charged. Eventually, a massive current of electricity in the form of a lightning bolt can shoot through the sky to even out the charge again. Each bolt makes the air much hotter than the surface of the Sun, causing it to expand explosively, which we hear as the crash and boom of thunder.

Like all processes and phenomena of nature, clouds are rife with metaphors for human life. (Coleridge himself used to frequent London’s science lectures, including Luke Howard’s, hunting for metaphors to backbone his poems.) With an eye to the astonishing fact that the average Cumulus weighs as much as eighty elephants, Pretor-Pinney considers how a cloud, composed of myriad small particles known as cloudlets, stays afloat: “A cloud stays up because it’s not one big thing but a group of tiny, tiny things,” he writes, which strikes me as an apt metaphor for how diversity and multiplicity ensure the buoyancy of any society.

Couple Cloudspotting for Beginners with 19th-century Norwegian artist Kund Baade’s haunting cloudscapes, then revisit poet Mark Strand’s love letter to the clouds and the story of how they got their names.

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