Le Moon

The moon is a curious thing to have a hold on someone. The other morning sitting on a stoop waiting for the Fung Wah bus to arrive I found myself staring at the moon, loving how it hung as if some technicolor postcard from the 50's/60's. And I also very much dig hearing about someone like John Wilkes Booth scurrying throughout Northern Virginia "by the light of the moon."

The moon is also the closest being to the Earth that helps us attempt to put the universe in perspective and shape the way we think about the possibility of a God. Yesterday I read an excerpt from Ben Franklin's Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion in which Franklin, a born skeptic to whom it presumably would never occur that one day man would visit the moon, questions whether a God would even notice man on Earth:

Also, when I stretch my Imagination thro' and beyond our System of Planets, beyond the visible fix'd Stars themselves, into that Space that is every Way infinite, and conceive it fill'd with Suns like ours, each with a Chorus of Worlds for ever moving round him, then this little Ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow Imagination, to be almost Nothing, and my self less than nothing, and of no sort of Consequence.

When I think thus, I imagine it great Vanity in me to suppose, that the Supremely Perfect, does in the least regard such an inconsiderable Nothing as Man. More especially, since it is impossible for me to have any positive clear Idea of that which is infinite and incomprehensible, I cannot conceive otherwise, than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no Worship or Praise from us, but that he is even INFINITELY ABOVE IT.

And still, 200 years+ later, some of the very men that went to the moon came back feeling as if their trip to the moon in their own minds at least made them question the existence of a God, as seen in the awesome doc In the Shadow of the Moon.

The most famous of these respective quotes in the doc is prolly Jim Lovell:

"We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon, you can put your thumb up, and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you have ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself, all behind your thumb. And how insignificant we really all are."

It could be read that Lovell sees this as "we're small in a way that connotes something bigger, meaning God, since that something bigger surely must have some direct relationship to ourselves," whereas I see it more in line with Franklin in a we're such a tiny, tiny speck of nothingness in the universe it makes no sense that there's a God that even bothers with us, much less is in our image as controller of the universe etc idea. Either way, it's amazing the centuries of thinking the moon has provoked in how we see ourselves within the universe, be it from men in ancient times, in Ben Franklin's time or those that have actually walked on it.

The moon. A trippy fucking thing.