Mad Over the Moon

A continuing story in the news over the past several years has been about some people being a bit mad over the moon.  Mad -- angry, that is -- over the decision not to try to send astronauts to the moon again, or even set up a colony there.  The anger has, admirably, been expressed with civility, but the underlying feelings of disappointment and frustration are detectable

It is with a different sense of the word "mad" that people down through history have been mad over the moon:   "Mad" in the sense of enthusiastic about it and adoring it.  Poets, playwrights, and songwriters have frequently either been enamored by the moon or had a crush on it.  People today know the line "Shine on, shine on, harvest moon," even if they can't sing the rest of the song.  As well as the phrase "by the light of the silvery moon" from another love song.  In Hinduism, one symbolic expression of God's love for the human race are classic paintings in which Krishna meets the delighted milkmaids under the light of the moon.

"Violinist in the Moonlight"
 by Hans Thoma

Not that the moon has always been associated with faithfulness.  In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, in a moonlit setting, Romeo is on the verge of swearing by the moon to express his love to Juliet.  But she replies, "Oh, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb."  Despite such occasional misgivings, the human race has usually found the moon to be a model of reliability in its recurring phases from new moon to full.  The nearly monthly period of the phases have, understandably, been associated with a woman's menstrual periods.  That feminine association emerged, along with a sense of the moonlight's softness compared to the intense male sun.

Thanks to modern science, we know, however, that the moon is not that soft in its power of gravity, being the primary force making the tides, which in turn stimulate the ocean-shore life of birds and mollusks and more.  The writer Jeffrey Sobosan makes an interesting juxtaposition of our scientific and romantic attachments to the moon.  Reflecting upon the countless bodies in our galaxy, he writes that the moon is "the only one on which human feet have walked," but is also the "best known of our companions in the universe."

A grandmother I know tells me a story about her four-year-old granddaughter.  The two of them were sitting outside at night in the backyard, something they had hardly ever done.  The grandmother pointed up at the bright white ball in the dark sky, and told the child, "Look, that's the moon."  The four-year-old replied," Da moon? Will it fall?"  Oh, that I could more often have such a childlike sense of wonder and discovery!  Oh, that I might be mad about the moon, that it might enable me to more intensely love this world.

~~~

Have you looked at the moon recently?  When?  What was it like?

(The quotation by Jeffrey G. Sobosan is from

Romancing the Universe, © 1999.  p. 10.)

The Ambiguity of Nature

There is a somewhat apocryphal story about Albert Einstein having once been asked what is the most important question that can be asked.  As the often repeated story has it, his reply was "Whether the universe is friendly or not."  That story developed out of some other things Einstein did say (even though he never said quite those words).  I think that the story has taken that form because it speaks to a universal human concern.

Although few of us have Einstein's mathematical knowledge about the universe, we do encounter the non-human world on the level of what we call "Nature."  We experience sunrise and darkness, good and bad weather, trees producing fruit as well as falling on houses, melodious birds and insect pests, beautiful flowers and poison ivy.  As that list demonstrates, we encounter the ambiguous character of Nature, and so we easily ask whether the world is "friendly or not."

What gets tricky about this ambiguity is that the answer we come up with can depend so much upon our own perception.  We can interpret the same natural phenomenon in different ways.

In all the volumes of literature in which the ambiguity of Nature is addressed, one usually overlooked book is Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The young Huck (who is the book's narrator) perceives nature differently depending upon whether or not he is lonely.  Early in the narrative, when he is living with the Widow Douglas, with whom he feels no camaraderie, Nature seems ominous.  Alone in his room at night, Huck describes how it was "so lonesome I most wished I was dead.  The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful;... and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me."

In contrast, after Huck begins to develop a somewhat brotherly friendship with Jim on their raft journey, Nature is experienced favorably by Huck.

As one example, Huck now depicts nighttime as being beautiful: "Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark -- which was a candle in a cabin window.... It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars."

In this example, Huck's human relationships affect his ability to feel at home in the natural world,  In contrast, in other cases, many people have discovered how Nature can become a healing balm or a source of companionship when human relationships could not comfort.  In those instances, Nature became the needed friend.

The issue is a spiritual one, because, as the 20th-century philosopher Ernst Bloch put it:

"The wish at the heart of religion is still 

that the human being should feel at home 

in the mystery of existence."

~~~

When have you felt at home in Nature?  How did the universe then feel to you?

(The Bloch quote is from his The Principle of Hope, © 1959,

as quoted in God in Creation by Jürgen Moltmann, © 1985, p. 321.)