More complex, precise, and costly than a modern-day army, the vast machinery of Cape Kennedy ponderously rumbles toward the critical moment. Within eight days, at an instant and a place that have been predetermined with great accuracy, two men will set foot on lunar soil, marking a singular date on mankind’s calendar, and translating into reality something that in every previous century had been considered not merely impossible but the paradigm, the customary synonym for impossibility.
It will become necessary (or rather, it ought to become necessary: common parlance is conservative, we still use terms like a quattro palmenti, a tutto spiano—literally, “with four millstones,” and “full ration,” both meaning “all out”—even though no one any longer knows the ancient references contained in these metaphors), it will become necessary, then, to renounce the “world on the Moon” taken as a symbol of vain fantasies, as a non-place; and yet it’s amusing to remember that, just twenty years ago, we spoke of “the far side of the Moon” as a typical instance of an inaccessible reality, essentially unobservable. Even to talk about it was pure futility: like debating the sex of the angels, or the Talmudic bird that Isaac Deutscher2 mentions, which flies around the Earth and spits on it every seventy years.
So we’re about to take a big step: whether or not our legs are long enough is something that for now remains to be seen. Do we know what we’re doing? A number of indications suggest that we have every reason to doubt it. Of course we know, and we tell each other, the literal—I was about to say, the athletic—meaning of the undertaking: it’s the most daring, and at the same time the most meticulous, operation that man has ever attempted; it’s the longest journey, it’s the most foreign environment. But why we’re doing it we couldn’t say: the motives that are offered are too numerous, intimately intertwined and yet mutually exclusive.
Beneath them all, at the base of them all, we can glimpse an archetype. Beneath the intricacy of the calculation lies perhaps our obscure obedience to an impulse that comes into existence when we are born, and is crucial to life itself, the same impulse that drives poplar seeds to wrap themselves in cottony tufts so they can waft great distances on the breeze, that drives frogs after their final metamorphosis to migrate obstinately from pond to pond, at risk of their lives: it is the drive to disseminate and diffuse one’s kind over as vast a territory as possible, since, notoriously, it is the “little plot of ground” that make us fierce, and the proximity of our neighbors that unleashes in us humans, as in all animals, the ancestral mechanisms of aggression, defense, and flight.
Even less do we know, in spite of the claims of the brave new science of “futurism,” where this next step will take us. The great technological leaps of the past two centuries (the new metallurgies, the steam engine, electrical power, the internal combustion engine) have all triggered profound sociological transformations, but they did not shake the foundations of human nature; in contrast, at least four major new developments of the past thirty years (nuclear power, solid-state physics, anti-parasitics, and detergents) have brought about consequences much vaster, and of a very different character, than anyone might have dared to predict. Of them, at least three gravely threaten the equilibrium of life on the planet, and are forcing us to engage in some hasty rethinking.
In spite of these doubts, and in spite of the catastrophic problems that assail the human race, two men are going to set foot on the Moon. We the many, we the public, are by now unsurprised, like spoiled children: the rapid succession of portentous exploits in space is deadening our capacity for wonder, although that is intrinsic to human beings, fundamental to feeling alive. Not many of us will be capable of reliving, in tomorrow’s flight, Astolfo’s feat, or Dante’s theological astonishment, as he feels his body penetrate the diaphanous lunar material, “shining, solid, firm, and polished.” Sadly, this time of ours is not an age of poetry: we no longer know how to create it, we don’t know how to distill it from the fabulous events that are taking place above our heads.
Perhaps it’s too early: we have only to wait, and a poet of space will surely come? There is no guarantee. Aviation, the next-to-last great leap, is now sixty years old, and it has given us no poets other than Saint-Exupéry and, one step down, Lindbergh and Hillary3: all three of them took their inspiration from the precarious, the adventuresome, the unpredictable. The literature of the sea died with the end of navigation under sail; there never has been, nor could we imagine, a poetry of the rails. The flight of Collins, Armstrong, and Aldrin is too safe, too well planned, not “reckless” enough to offer material to any poet. Certainly, we may be asking too much, but still we feel defrauded. More or less consciously, we’d like the new navigators to have this virtue as well, alongside the many others that distinguish them: if only they knew how to transmit, communicate, and sing what they see and experience.
It’s unlikely that this will happen, in the near future or later. Out of the black cradle primeval where there is neither up nor down, neither beginning nor end, out of the realm of Tohu and Bohu, no words of poetry have come to us thus far, save perhaps for a few naïve phrases uttered by poor Yuri Gagarin: nothing but the nasal sounds, inhuman in their chilly calm, of the radio messages exchanged with Earth, in accordance with a rigid protocol. They do not seem like human voices: they are as incomprehensible as space, motion, and eternity.
1. Published on the eve of the first human landing on the Moon, by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, July 21, 1969; while Aldrin and Armstrong spent almost twenty-four hours on the lunar surface, Michael Collins stayed in Apollo 11 orbiting the Moon.
2. Isaac Deutscher (1906–1967), a Polish historian.
3. Richard Hillary (1919–1943) is the author of The Last Enemy, an account of his experiences as a pilot during the Second World War.