In terms of a space journey, the first place one thinks of going is the Moon. It is like an encounter with one's lonely self, the only member of its class, silent, solitary. What romantic and tortured past can we read into the scars the Moon bears? What inner musings can we attribute to the yellow voyager's regular swings around this blue behemoth on which we live? How fitting that the astronauts who first visited the lonely orb ended up abandoning the place, leaving their tawdry detritus behind to freeze under a fine moon powder, letting the Moon keep its own company again. So this object of humanity's first space lust, probed first in Cyrano de Bergerac's fabulations and by many thereafter, remains finally virginal and unconquered . . . while we sublunaries reflect on our own strange solitary fate as we sail forth on this cosmic sea of mystery.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Moon
In terms of a space journey, the first place one thinks of going is the Moon. It is like an encounter with one's lonely self, the only member of its class, silent, solitary. What romantic and tortured past can we read into the scars the Moon bears? What inner musings can we attribute to the yellow voyager's regular swings around this blue behemoth on which we live? How fitting that the astronauts who first visited the lonely orb ended up abandoning the place, leaving their tawdry detritus behind to freeze under a fine moon powder, letting the Moon keep its own company again. So this object of humanity's first space lust, probed first in Cyrano de Bergerac's fabulations and by many thereafter, remains finally virginal and unconquered . . . while we sublunaries reflect on our own strange solitary fate as we sail forth on this cosmic sea of mystery.
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