A Sixties Scrapbook, Volume 14 #1

Man on the Moon

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 of thirty billion dollars and, vroom!, there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

Ask him, "Man, why are you up there on that rock?" And the best reply he can give you is a tired old wisecrack. "Because it's here." He doesn't even know what makes him tick.

What he is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him....

Like Ahab on the doomed Pequod, he would rather die attempting to assert his mastery of fate than cope with the workaday excitement of doing the possible.

This is why the triumph of man on the moon is diluted with so many banal ironies. How ingenious, we may rightly marvel, that man was able to provide himself on this adventure with a pure atmosphere to breathe on that airless rock.

How ironic that while he was contriving to breathe pure air on the moon, he was at the same time poisoning the sweet air of the home rock with the byproduct garbages created by old impossibilities overcome.

Excerpted from the New York Times, July 21, 1969. Copyright (c) 1969 by the New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Photo: Canapress/NASA.