Moon! Moon! am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.
The moon is nothing but a circumambulating aphrodisiac divinely subsidized to provoke the world into a rising birth-rate.
There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.
This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely.
Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra… these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known… this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.