The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Author:Verlyn Klinkenborg [KLINKENBORG, VERLYN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT024000
ISBN: 9780316029322
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

Throughout history, the moon has been a byword for mutability, its inconstancy an emblem of the inconstancy of human affairs. One night it rises dark, a new moon. One night a sliver of it hangs in the western sky, nearly catching Venus within its horns. One night it lies distended on the eastern horizon, not a sphere but a flattened disk slipping out of Earth’s shadow. On no two consecutive nights has it ever risen at the same time or in the same shape. Even now, thirty years after humans first set foot on the moon, it still seems natural to attribute these qualities to the orb itself and not to the perspective we view it from.

Those who were alive then, a generation ago, will remember many things about that night, July 20, 1969. The moon was a waxing crescent that just suggested the contours of its dark limb. Where skies were clear and dark, people walked outdoors and gazed at the moon, then walked back inside and looked at the scratchy black-and-white TV transmission from the landing site on the Sea of Tranquillity, then walked back outside again. Of all the imaginative leaps that occurred during the preparations for Apollo 11, and during the Mercury and Gemini projects, none were as difficult, because none were as abrupt, as the imaginative leap that ordinary people faced when confronted with the fact of a moon landing. And who is to say which part of that leap was harder? Realizing that two men really stood at that moment upon the moon? Recognizing the technical virtuosity and determination that had made it possible? Or understanding, for one unsettling instant, that we too, like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, stood upon a sphere hurtling through the darkness of space?

If people groped to understand what it all meant while it was actually happening, we’re still groping thirty years later. The iconic simplicity of that moment—Neil Armstrong’s leap onto the moon’s surface—has obscured the technical complexity, the sheer engineering will, that lay behind it. The photograph of the first American flag on the moon’s surface, standing stiffly against the void of deep space, no longer suggests to us, as it did to some at the time, that America in 1969 was a nation at war with Vietnam and with itself. Looking back, I find myself wondering how it was possible to send a man from the turbulent America of the 1960s all the way to the Sea of Tranquillity.

What’s most surprising about the events of that night long ago is that they’re more surprising now than they were then. The breathlessness of the moment itself has subsided into mere fact. But in its place, an inescapable question has emerged. Who were we then that such a thing was possible?

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