A Rock, an Island
On the Loneliness of the Moon
“If anyone understood loneliness, the moon would.” – Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
“The moon…I know that my own impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding type of existence or expanse of nothing.” – Apollo 8 Astronaut Frank Borman, Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit
“A rock feels no pain. And an Island never cries.” – Paul Simon. “I Am a Rock”
Waxing Crescent:
The moon, is, on average, 240,000 miles away. That’s more miles than the accumulated cross country flights from my long distance dating, more miles than the lifetime of the beater car in which you had your first kiss. And yet, astronomically speaking, the moon is quite proximate – our closest companion. At its nearest approach it dips within 30 earth diameters, over 100 times closer than any other major planetary body. And yet, each perihelion approach is accompanied by a retreat. So close, yet so far. Near, but never touching. Visible, but always apart.
First Quarter:
Much of our perception of the moon is in the form of illusion. Consider its phases. Though the moon appears to grow from thumbnail to circle, in reality it’s not changing – rather we are just seeing increasing portions of its illuminated side, its side facing the sun.
Consider too it’s reddish hue as it rises. Not really red, the hue is a trick of the atmosphere, which scatters away blue light, a trick identical to that which gives a sunset its bloody blush.
And, consider, how the moon appears so large near the horizon - an optical illusion from the apparent proximity of nearby trees and buildings. The illusion is short lived. As the earth turns away, the moon rises, and we soon see it small and distant, a tiny companionless orb perched on top of the sky.
Waxing Gibbous:
We think the moon was formed in a great collision of a giant asteroid with earth, when both were molten and young. The violence of the encounter spewed earth and astroid guts into space, far separated from their original home. Over the next many millennia, these guts coalesced and then hardened into the solid rock that is now the moon.
The moon’s likely origin as collision debris means it has a comparatively small, rocky heart, with no magnetic fields to protect its surface from the harshness of space. More, after forming its insides cooled rapidly, so that the interior of the moon is no longer molten. The fires of its core long extinguished, the moon no longer contains any internal heat.
Full:
When the moon shines it brightest, the stars around it retreat, hiding behind the washed out glare of its obscuring light. Astronomers, seeking those stars, avoid the full moon.
Waning Gibbous:
Look, the moon isn’t a happy story, isn’t a happy place. It’s buried in many feet of space dust, but still not enough to hide the scarring on its cratered, pockmarked face – disfigured by the impacts of giant space rocks at 60,000 mph. You can see evidence of its past bleeding heart in its great hardened lava flows, which astronomers call mara - latin for seas, as in pools of tears. The man on the moon has always had, to me, hollow eyes, and a mouth frozen open mid cry. Perhaps I understand why.
Third Quarter:
Near the moon’s poles there exists deep craters which live in permanent shadow – holes so deep the suns rays never touch them with light. NASA has found that these holes hold water from a history long past, now fully iced over, as memory, of a time with more heat, or, at least, light.
Waning Crescent:
Julie Otsuka describes an unnamed boy in an 1940s internment camp, separated from his father, gazing at the moon, wondering if they even had toothpaste in Lordsburg, his father’s reported location. “He wondered if you could see the same moon in Lordsburg,... And he decided that you could, depending on the clouds. 'Same moon,' he whispered to himself, 'same moon.'" Have you whispered the same?
New Moon:
The other night, I was at a farm in the middle of nowhere western Wisconsin. I sat by myself on a hill near the barn, watching the moon slowly set. The tunes of some folk band floated out the barn’s open lit door. On the next hill, under the setting moon, I noticed two silhouettes approach each each other. Their shadowed hands touched. And they began to dance, to twirl, to swing: black against the evening twilight. They spun and curved, a silent, but wonderful drama. I watched, and watched, until nocturn blackness swallowed them from view.
We might say this for the moon: though the grinding effect of its tidal pull increases its separation by ~1.5 inches each year, that same interaction has stabilized our planetary tilt. Because of the moon, the earth has stable seasons and a sufficiently moderate climate for the development of life, friendships, and even the development of technology for humans to visit. Though its heart is cold, the moon stays here – present – orbiting in an eternal dance, an attending companion in the vastness of the night.