The same moon, the earth’s one and only satellite, that has inspired all kinds of majestic arts: sublime paintings (Van Gogh’s Moonrise and Landscape With Couple Walking and Crescent Moon) soul-searching poetry (Robert Frost’s Freedom of the Moon, and Baudelaire’s The Sadness of the Moon), some of the best music (Mozart and Chopin’s Moonlight Sonatas) and a plethora of adventure novels (Robert Heinlein’s classics like Rocket Ship Galileo and The Man Who Sold the Moon). All this sparks the desire among us humans to scale the lofty heights, to one day be up there, up above the rambling clouds, beyond the nocturnal skies our eyes can take in.[break]
Growing up in Rome, Michael Collins must have admired the beautiful statutes of Diana, the Roman goddess of moon, dotting the thoroughfares of the ancient city-state. Perhaps it was those statutes that made him dream of conquering the rocky, white landscape where the goddess would be waiting for him with open arms. But he never quite made it. And it was his near miss that I remembered in those full-moon nights. How lonely he must have felt in his spacecraft orbiting the moon as two of his colleagues, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, hopped off the lunar module on to the undulating surface, one after another, on July 21, 1969. How Collins must have spent those 15 excruciating hours up there, all by himself, waiting for his friends to return.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
For other dreamers likes Van Gogh and Mozart, the moon had been a treasure trove, an inspiration for some of their best works. Laxmi Prasad Devkota saw conquering the moon as the height of human achievement. By the second half of the 20th century, authors like Heinlein piqued people’s imagination with their sci-fi bestsellers like The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950). Its protagonist, Delos D Harriman, wants to get to the moon. But unlike Armstrong and Aldrin, his dream to land on the moon is unfulfilled to the end; his life goal of establishing a human colony up there cruelly cut short.
On the strength of scientific evidence so far, colonization of the Moon as Harriman envisioned is by no means unimaginable. For thousands of years, the desire to escape the Earth’s gravity has been among the biggest human yearnings. In the Hindu religious epic of Ramayan, the demon god Ravan abducts Sita on his Puspak Biman. Leonardo da Vinci was sketching the prototypes of modern-day helicopters as far back as late 15th century.
Today, private aeronautical companies like Virgin Galactic are already exploring ways to make space tourism a viable business. But Richard Branson, the company’s boss, sees far greater returns from space travel. In his reckoning, “Today’s generation has the technological ability to do more industrial work up there [in the space], providing communications, advanced science and even, potentially, solar power and [computer] server farms in space—thus taking CO2-intensive industry out of the atmosphere.”
Scientists, for their part, are talking of mining the Moon for its bountiful natural resources. Excalibur Almaz, another British establishment, hopes to be the first company in the world to take tourists to the Moon, as early as 2015.
In a not too distant future, even Mars could emerge as a likely tourist destination. Neil Armstrong certainly relished the possibility. Only a couple of years ago, Armstrong, 80 at the time, had expressed his willingness to command a mission to Mars.
But spare a thought for Michael Collins! He is among those historical figures whose names titillate the brain, but we can’t quite bring to mind because someone else pipped them at the post: Collins by Armstrong and Aldrin; Antonio Muicci by Alexander Graham Bell; Alfred Russell Wallace by Charles Darwin.
As he orbited the Moon, sometimes Collin’s aircraft would fall behind it, where he was cut off from all radio signals from the Earth. At those times, he felt “truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.”
There is a thin line between solitude and loneliness. Some days I was on the terrace all by myself, I felt abundant, of new ideas, of love, of the sheer will to live. At other times, the moonlit nights reminded me of how lonely life can sometimes be, so cruel, so unfair, happiness as distant as the radiating disc up in the sky.
“Everyone is a moon,” said Mark Twain, each with “a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
It is a side often brought into sharp relief on those moody-moony nights.
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica.
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