Last time, Sappho’s moon had set. On a January Thursday night, ours in Woodlawn is still climbing. It’s hanging in the east, over Wakefield. A lot to do before I sleep, but 10:30 seems early enough to do it.
But there hangs the waning moon, it’s bright edge towards the sun to come.
Among the beautiful words in the language are Archibald MacLeish’s, in “You, Andrew Marvell”:
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
But now, it’s the coming on of the sun that strikes me. More than eight hours away, but already the moon shows that it is coming, no matter how much I have to do before the new day.
Striking in their own way are the opening words of Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
“You see, I had this space suit.”
I must have been about twelve when I read that sentence, and was hooked. Even then, I think, I realized that it was as much about becoming friends as a science fiction adventure.
What has always stuck with me has been the two young people’s desperate trip across the desolate surface of the moon. I remember standing in a frigid wind on Pelham Parkway, waiting for a bus, and looking up at the moon. How cold and bright and distant it looked, and I thought about the book and the desperate journey.
On a warm summer evening in Connecticut, trying out Jackie and Andy’s new telescope, looking at the low and yellowish moon, and thinking about the book. (Jackie and Andy are a story for another time; enough now to say that I will always miss them).
And strangest of all, the night of the first moon landing, looking at the moon. Of course, I thought about Armstrong and Aldrin. But to my surprise, the thought of Have Space Suit came to me too.
And even now, the dawn is creeping “up the curving east” in MacLeish’s words, and I still have things to do.
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