It’s only a paper moon

hanging over a cardboard sea

When I was at the beach, there was a magnificent moon. Phone cameras are no good at taking pictures of the moon—I don’t know why. I did my best but the picture I took, while perfectly nice, isn’t what it was like at all. It was so vivid that for a moment I could really see all the shapes people saw in the face of the moon in the past.

But then I felt sad. I thought about all the people in the past who had been able to look up at the moon as a beautiful mystery they’d only ever know from afar. For me, the moon is beautiful but without mystery. People have walked on it. You can touch a rock from the moon in a museum. Of course it’s unlikely I’ll ever go to the moon. But people can and people have. There are footprints up there now. Spiritually if not literally. But maybe literally, too.

I began to feel sadder and sadder, as if deprived of some essential human experience. I’d been cut off from the past. I couldn’t see the same moon as my great grandmother or Van Gogh or Socrates or Jesus. …