下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
The moon, this enormous rock which from far out there accompanies the earth on its voyage around the sun, is the only celestial body in our immediate vicinity. We see it in the evening and at night, when it reflects the light from the sun, which is hidden from us so that the moon appears fluorescent and seemingly reigns supreme in the sky. At times it appears to be far away, like a small, distant ball, at times it comes closer, and sometimes it hangs suspended like a large luminous disc right above the treetops, like a ship approaching harbour. That its surface is uneven can be seen with the naked eye; some areas are light, others dark. Before the invention of the telescope it was thought that the dark areas were oceans. Others were of the opinion that they were forests. Now we know that the shadows are enormous plains of lava, which at one time pushed up from the moon’s interior and filled the craters on its surface before hardening. If one points a telescope towards the moon, one can see that it is completely lifeless and barren and consists of dust and rock, like an enormous sand quarry. Not even a breath of wind ruffles it, ever; the moon is ruled by silence, by immobility, like an eternal image of a world before life, or of a world after life. Is that what dying is like? Is this what awaits us? It probably is. On earth, surrounded by abundant, crawling, flying life, there is something conciliatory about death, as if it too is part of everything that grows and expands, that this is what we disappear into when we die. But that is an illusion, a fantasy, a dream. The interstellar nothing, the absolutely empty and absolutely black, with the eternal and endless solitude this entails, which the moon, since it resembles earth, makes it possible to glimpse briefly, this is what awaits us. The moon is the eye of all that is dead, it hangs there blindly, indifferent to us and to our affairs, those waves of life which rise and subside on earth far down below. But it didn’t have to be that way, for the moon is so close that it is possible to travel there from here, as to a distant island. The journey there takes two days. And at one time the moon was much, much closer. Now it is well over three hundred thousand kilometres away from us; when it first appeared, it was only twenty thousand kilometres distant. It must have been gigantic in the sky. Considering the peculiar kinds of creatures which have developed on earth from primordial times until today, with the most remarkable traits to enable them to meet the physical demands of their environment, it wouldn’t have taken that much of an adjustment for creatures to appear that were equipped with the qualities required to cross the short distance in space, the way life on earth has always managed to cross the distance to even the most distant islands, and thus has brought life there. The common horsetail, a primitive, primeval plant, couldn’t its spools have developed a way of spinning that could have taken them up through the atmosphere and allowed them to drift slowly through space, landing gently in the dust of the moon a few weeks later? Or the jellyfish, couldn’t they have left the oceans to float like bells through the air? Air-fish, would that have been any more remarkable than fluorescent, blind deep-sea fish? Not to mention birds. Then life on the moon would have resembled life on earth, but would still have been different, like a radical version of the Galapagos, and the moon’s birds, almost weightless, independent of oxygen, would have been able to come in swarms over the earth, visible as tiny specks far, far up there, slowly growing larger, and gliding with their enormous, paper-thin wings over the fields, shimmering in the light of the moon, which for the people of that time was the seat of the sacred and the terrible.