The View from the Moon

Some years ago a good friend pointed out that the best writing in any given week will appear somewhere in the New Yorker. It is pretty hard to know how anyone can make such a sweeping statement with any finality or authority. Like saying that War and Peace is the greatest novel ever written—how many novels does a man have to read before he can make a statement like that? And yet the idea has grown on me that my friend might just be right. At any rate, the thing happened again: In an unsigned article under the “Talk of the Town” in the January 4 issue, there it was: the best thing written to date on the flight of Apollo 8. What will ever happen to that article, a superb parallel drawn between Apollo 8 and Christmas, of all things, with the constant counterpoint throughout of what we all experienced: “Some failure of private response.”

So it was with me: “some failure of private response.” I wasn’t big enough; my imagination had to be jacked up constantly. “This is really happening,” I kept saying. “It really did happen,” I could finally say, after what the New Yorker editorialist described as “apprehension, elation, incredulity, awe, relief, and pride.” What a time it all was, and yet content and meaning kept slipping away from me.

It is something like watching a clock. You can see the second hand sweeping, but unless the clock is a very big one you can hardly see the minute hand move, and you can never see the hour hand move at all. If something moves you can surely see it move, can’t you? Well, concentrate with everything you have and you won’t see the hour hand move; still, it moves.

With Apollo 8 something moved. I am not sure yet that I saw it move, but in one lifetime (my own), the day when the cow jumped over the moon (some joke that!) and the day when three men flew around the backside of the moon have both passed. So a thousand years in God’s sight are like “yesterday when it is passed.” And yesterday has already passed.

So we ponder its passing. Where did those three men come from? How do you make men like that? Education is big business now and there are all kinds of educational schemes, but have we learned how to develop characters like that? I couldn’t take my eyes off their pictures in Time (and the same picture appeared over and over in so many places), just those three men who had arrived at this point in time together. There were those three great faces marked by manliness and intelligence and courage. Think of the way they stood there before the flight, with their impressive simplicity and quietness. And all this was topped finally by the simple “Roger” by which they settled the decision to leave the orbit of the earth and literally “shoot for the moon.” Talk about an existential moment!

I have heard from many sources for a long time that the world is going to the dogs. Maybe so. But if it really is, then it has been at it for the last 10,000 years, so why hasn’t it made it yet? And with the dog-eat-dog of our own day, there are still those brave and dedicated men to think about, and behind them the tremendous visions of the last few years, and dreams turned into material, and pure math turned into tracks in the trackless skies, and a marvelous team effort of hundreds of brilliant experts, and a globe full of the right kinds of people who kept wishing them well, and a nameless writer in a supremely sophisticated magazine who caught it all and who, with his editor, believed that their kind of reader would appreciate it all in this sort of way. Ah, Pascal; the majesty and misery of man.

I am not foolish enough to try even to guess what the moon really is or what has been happening to it in all this. It is sad, in a way, to know what we now know, for the moon has always had a strange hold on men’s hearts. “The Moon and You” has taken a bad turn; that moon rhymes with soon and tune, and especially with croon and spoon, all seems so irrelevant now. What a strange travesty now that the soaring resources of the human spirit have apparently concluded for all of us that the moon is nothing more than a heavenly dustbin.

Meanwhile, to get back to earth, how did your own planet affect you as you looked at it from out there in the solar system? Like not much, I think. So “why should the spirit of mortal be proud,” and just what are your prides today? The Scriptures talked long ago about the nations as a “drop of a bucket,” and “the small dust of the balance.” Something for a little blotter or a slight breeze. Meanwhile they carry on a sad childish argument in Paris about chief seats and some girl someplace is crying her eyes out because she wasn’t chosen for a sorority. Cheerleading takes on a hollow sound, money clinks badly, all flesh is as grass. The planet earth looked lonely and cold, cut off, whirling through infinite space for what possible reasons. A penny in front of your eye can cut off your vision; a new vision from outer space can’t quite make out the pennies.

It’s just as well now to forget about conquering space. The builders of the tower of Babel fell into confusion because of a basic confusion; they thought they could build a tower to heaven. Missing the whole point of the wonder of God, not quite understanding the cosmic nonsense of what they proposed to do, they finally began to talk foolishness to one another. Men do not go up; God comes down. We do not presume on heaven; heaven condescends. No, even at the speed of light we shall hardly kick loose from our own solar system; the earth is almost out of sight already and we have only reached the moon. But maybe we are one up on the builders of Babel; we don’t expect to build to heaven (because we don’t believe in heaven anymore?), and that at least gives us a modest approach to Reality.

But could it be, could it possibly be, that men will learn afresh about wonder, and awe, and majesty, and eternity, and infinity, and learn for sure that even the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Him? Men could turn their marvelous resources in that direction—no dustbin there!

ADDISON H. LEITCH

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