Every night, for everyone who ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how lucky we are, each hole a monument to the odds we overcame to exist, a remnant of the violent collision that created our rocky planet full of life and ripped through its body our only satellite with its small name of a miracle that is 40 times more amazing than the Sun and exactly 400 times closer to the Earth, so that each time it passes between the two, the Moon covers the face of our star well, putting us in the middle of the night: the rare miracle of a total solar eclipse.
It is impossible to know this and not see a miracle in its night light.
The light of the moon changes the atmosphere of the day, it rains a lot of dust.
“The sky was a royal blue castle without the brightest stars, while the mountains on either side were transformed into silver bars, as their quartz reflected the moonlight,” wrote Dervla Murphy in Pakistan.
“We found many delights to the eye and intellect… in the play of the moonlight shining over the mountainous sea of ice,” wrote Frederick Cook in Antarctica.
“The whole bay is filled with moonlight and in that bright light the snowy mountains appear whiter than the snow itself,” wrote Rockwell Kent in Alaska.
I remember when I was young and lonely, those endless summers in the Bulgarian mountains, waiting for the evening, waiting for the Moon to shed its soft light on the sharp edges of tomorrow and give the past something eternal.
Moonlight changes the state of the soul: Leonard Cohen moved where the sweet songs come from; Sylvia Plath found in it a fascinating lens into the darkness of the mind; to Toni Morrison, the love of the moon was a measure of freedom; for Virginia Woolf, it was the magnifying lens of love as she persuaded her lover Vita to “eat by the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight.”
I have never come across a good account of this double change except the passage from which it originates Watership Down (public library) – a wonderful 1973 novel that began with a story Richard Adams dreamed up to entertain his two young daughters on a long car trip. Nestled in the middle of his allegorical rabbit tale is Adams's delight in moonlight:
The full moon, rising from the cloudless eastern sky, covered a lonely high place with its light. We do not recognize the light of day as that which dispels darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is covered with clouds, seems to us a natural state of the earth and air… We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is flexible. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to the extent that it cannot obscure the day.
Adams appreciates moonlight as one of those forbidden graces that give ordinary life “a singular and wonderful quality” – a grace that did not need to exist and in this sense is unnecessary, like many of the best things in life, which CS Lewis took when he asserted that “friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art itself, like the universe itself.” [and] it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives importance to survival.”
A century after Walt Whitman exulted that the Moon “commends itself to true men by its usefulness, and makes its uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands,” Adams wrote:
Water is necessary for us, but a waterfall is not important. Where it is found is something extra, a beautiful decoration. We need daylight and to that extent it helps, but we don't need moonlight. When it comes, it doesn't work out of necessity. It changes. It crosses the bank and the grass, dividing the long side from the other; changing brown, snowy leaves from a single pile to countless bright parts; or glittering lengths along the branches of water as if the light itself were ductile. Its long beams flow, white and sharp, between the trunks of the trees, their clarity fading as they sink into the powdery, misty distance of the beech forest at night. In the light of the moon, two acres of bent hay, immobile and ankle-sweeping, falling and rough like a horse's mane, appeared like a bay of waves, all shadowy nooks and crannies. It grows so thick and compact that even the wind does not stir, but the moonlight that appears silences it. We don't take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but it changes what unites it.
These episodes appear Watership Down it reminded me of a relative of music Aldous Huxley composed half a century before Adams meditated in music on the universe and our place in it, thinking of the Moon as a mirror not of the Sun but of the soul. In keeping with Paul Goodman's spiritual taxonomy of peace, Huxley offers a spiritual taxonomy of moonlight:
The moon is a stone; but it is a precious stone. Or, to be more precise, it is a stone where and because of it men and women have many emotions. Thus, there is a soft moonlight that can give us a peace beyond understanding. There is moonlight that inspires a kind of fear. There is a cold and negative moonlight that tells the soul of loneliness and isolation in its despair, smallness or impurity. There is a happy moonlight that encourages love – not just one person but sometimes even the whole world.
Fill in the story of the first surviving picture of the Moon, which changed our relationship with the rest of the world, and enjoy this picture book about the Moon.
