One night last week we were sitting at home minding our own business, enjoying watching men in royal purple pyjamas play BBL cricket on TV. Suddenly a giant trespasser’s palely scary face looked in at us through a window.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It turned out to be the moon.
Some of us find the moon a little alarming at the best of times, never able to forget Donald Barthelme’s famous insight “See the moon? It hates us.”
All moons are unnerving but this was an unusually big and bright one (which was why we didn’t recognise it at first) because, a little research reveals, it was a Supermoon.
Supermoons swagger into our skies, pressing their noses against our windows, when a full moon occurs during the Moon's closest approach to Earth. Supermoons appear larger and brighter in the sky than routinely baloony moons.
The moon is already on thinking minds because this month in a first for our species China has achieved the first soft landing of a probe on the mysterious far side of the moon. A rover has been successfully trundled out on to the moon’s surface and, dutifully, has sent home its first pictures of its surroundings.
Alas, the pictures of dusty wastes dash any hopes that the far side of the moon might make up for the disappointments of the dreary, featureless, crater-pocked wastes of the moon we already know.
What a disappointment the moon is! What high hopes we once had of it! One of the most important of the high-hopes-raisers, was Johannes Hevelius, the subject of a new essay The 17th-Century Astronomer Who Made the First Atlas of the Moon, in the latest online edition of Smithsonian.com
Johannes Hevelius drew some of the first maps of the moon, praised for their detail, from his homemade rooftop observatory in the Kingdom of Poland. Hevelius was sincerely convinced that he could see on the moon features that were clearly continents, islands, seas, bays, rocks, swamps, marshes and a host of other lunar variations of features found on Earth.
His maps were very, very beautiful and popular, and embraced the charming delusion, we might call it Earthism, that the moon was essentially Earthy, Earth’s cousin, as geographically diverse, green, wondrous and Nature action-packed as our own planet. It was what Hevelius and earthlings wanted to believe.
The discovery that the moon is dry and lifeless, a place where not even the inventive Sir David Attenborough would find anything to make a wildlife doco about, has been a tragedy for our yearning, romantically-inclined species. We so badly wanted a friend, a playmate in our neighbourhood in the immensity of space. Instead what we have is this aloof stranger who may even hate us.
Italo Calvino captures the moon’s aloof, mysterious strangeness beautifully in his essay/short story Moon in the afternoon.
“The moon is the most changeable body in the visible universe, and [yet] the most regular in its complicated habits: it never fails to show up for an appointment and you can always wait for it at the appointed spot; but if you leave it in one place you always find it next in another, and if you recall its face turned in a certain way, you see it has already changed its pose, a little or a lot … it is imperceptibly eluding you.”
Yes, on the night in question the Supermoon, having paused and posed for a little in the frame of our Woden window, shimmied off to another place, perhaps to Tuggeranong to eerily beautify the former Hyperdome with beams of supermoon moonlight.
In another column in another place I’ve just indulged in a mediation, inspired by Trump’s newsy obsession with his wall, on our primitive fondness for walls, for the real and illusory protection they give us, for the comfort this brings.
I ran out of room to meditate on city walls, on how in ruthless places in medieval times walled cities gave their citizens some peace of mind, some of the time, in ferocious and troubled times when defence was essential.
At Visby on the island of Gotland in Sweden there is a beautifully preserved city wall (built of pale limestone it seemed to me in some lights to be made from ivory or from cheese). In one Cheddar-looking tower of Visby’s wall there is poignantly wedged boulder hurled at it (probably on 27 July 1361) by an invading army’s giant catapult.
Visby no longer needs its city walls to intercept missiles (rocks, fireballs, corpses of plague victims, etc. flung from siege engines) but the surviving wall (like so many city walls of the world) gives the spot it surrounds enviable character and geographical definition. Home in Canberra I have never quite got over the wall envy planted in my bosom by my week in lucky Visby.
Perhaps a hankering for protective walls evolved with us, from our primitive times on the savannahs, from a real need to keep real dangers at bay.
Surely NIMBYism, at which Canberrans excel, is an expression of this. It is an evolved instinct to build figurative walls around neighbourhoods so as to today keep out (in the way in which it was once a matter of life and death to keep out cannibal tribes and man-eating beasts) the savage unwashed working classes and the imagined threats they pose to NIMBYs’ leafily bourgeois ways of life.
