Overhead, the moon
Full, radiant, a beacon, illuminating the clouds that pass by so swiftly that their motion gives one the only real impression one can have from a point on this world that the whole of the thing on which we pass our lives is hurtling through space at speeds that defy every bit of sensory data generated by our poor animal mechanism.
Looking up, at that permanence that is still not quite permanent, but closer certainly than any of the paltry concerns with which we pass our days and which keep us awake at night, gazing with neck tilted, eyes to the heavens, at this celestial body a fourth the size of Earth passing only a few hundred thousand miles away, not even a hundred times greater than the distance I have driven in a matter of a few days with little rest, I feel certain that nothing goes through my mind that did not also occur to my forebears of 50,000 years ago as they looked skyward and had their gaze, as mine, magnetically fixed without any exertion of will, automatically and inevitably, to this ghostly visitor in the night.
How vast, the span of the black sky that looms over my head, over and behind and beyond the tops of the trees that dwarf me, the canvas on which that globe is graven and hung. In every direction from here into that void spin unseen stars and unperceived planets, innumerable, a quantity my mind could not fathom, even to see it represented in the symbols other primates like me invented.
How small am I, standing below these trees, watching this vast tableau above, how irrelevant to what occurs, as I stand watching, on all those countless worlds, all the dust storms and the volcanic explosions and the freezing gusts of wind and the lonely motion of the stray particles of unknown elements finding their determined destination after a voyage planned billions of years ago in the celestial mind of the universe.
Worlds are born and die as I gaze upward, unaware of the all of it.
How perfect this world into which I have been thrown. Perfect in its beauty, perfect in its hope, perfect too in its darkness, and its cruelty, and its despair, and its refusal ever to yield to our desires, especially to our desire to know it and thereby tame it and make it our own.
When I was a boy, I would think of mysteries like that of this unfathomable night sky, and I would be frightened, until I remembered that those adults who cared for me—my mother, my father, my grandparents, all the others who loved me and would look out for me in their wisdom and solicitude—were possessed of insights I did not have, of power I could not imagine, of authority and efficacy of which I could scarcely dream. Then I would be calmed, in the mere thought of those who I knew must know things I did not.
I think of my children, in their turn trusting in their confidence that I, their father, have figured out important things, when the truth is that I know nothing, am nothing, and all of us are careening off into the heart of a void so vast that it defies our every effort to articulate any relationship to it at all.
The absurd and total quiet of life, the pristine silence of all of humanity, alone in the shadow, save for that spectral globe hung there, painted there, carved there out of the black unending canvas on which it sits, a canvas that was never made and will never be unmade, that has been hung there by a force we do not dare comprehend at the beginning of time that had no beginning, that extends everywhere, forever, world without end.
All my kin asleep, or so it seems, though Australia bustles unknown underneath me as I stand in the dark.
How good, how indisputably good the design of a world that occludes that knowledge from my sensory machinery, making me the sole observer of our fate, as I contemplate the message the moon brings to me about my own place in the vast emptiness on which it reflects the rays of an unseen sun.