Man in the Moon

“ We "had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, than such a Roman" as is not at least distantly acquainted with that brilliant character in high life who careers so conspicuously amid the constellations which constitute the upper ten thousand of super-mundane society. And now some inquisitive individual may be impatient to interrupt our eloquence with the question, "What are you going to make of the man in the moon?" ”

“ The Man in the Moon.
From L. Richter.
EVERY one knows that the moon is inhabited by a man with a bundle of sticks on his back, who has been exiled thither for many centuries, and who is so far off that he is beyond the reach of death. ”

“ Why, he has been known to take the shine out of old Sol himself; though from his partiality to us it always makes him look black in the face when we, Alexander-like, stand between him and that luminary. We, too, are the only people by whom he ever allows himself to be eclipsed. Illustrious man in the moon I he has lifted our thoughts from earth to heaven, and we are reluctant to leave him. But the best of friends must part; especially as other lunar inhabitants await attention. ”

“ It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battle-ground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. ”

“ Here for the present we part company with the man in the moon as material for amusement, that we may track him through the mythic maze, where, in well-nigh every language, he has left some traces of his existence. As there is a side of the moon which we have never seen, and according to Laplace never shall see, there is also an aspect of the matter in hand that remains to be traversed, if we would circumambulate its entire extent. ”

“ Now a burning fire filled his inmost self with consuming power,—the moon made his eye blind to all that was not light; sublime forms rolled before him in the light stream, and he heard in his soul, new thoughts which are not indigenous in man, and are too great for memory; just as in a dream small melodies may come to the man who can make none when awake. Death and pleasure press upon his heavy tongue. "Rosamond, why sayest thou nothing? Dost thou see thy child? I look beyond the long earth, even to where the moon begins. ”

“ Whether we or our posterity will ever become better acquainted in this life with the man in the moon is problematical; but in the ages to come, "when the manifold wisdom of God" shall be developed among "the principalities and powers in heavenly places," he may be something more than a myth or topic of amusement. ”

“ And up and down the spiral galleries were scattered numerous moon people, pallid, faintly self-luminous beings, regarding our appearance or busied on unknown errands.
“Either I fancied it or a flake of snow came drifting down on the icy breeze. And then, falling like a snowflake, a little figure, a little man-insect clinging to a parachute, drove down very swiftly towards the central places of the moon. ”

“ The First Men in the Moon fails, in spite of a wealth of world-wide fancy and gigantesque logic, for lack of that one feeling which one of the older and more humane romances would have made us feel—the feeling of man returning after his nightmare of space and finding this common earth glowing all round him like a fire-lit room. ”

“ Have not we all frequently affirmed that we knew no more about certain inscrutable matters than the man in the moon? Now we would never have committed ourselves to such a comparison had we not been sure that the said man was a veritable and creditable, though somewhat uninstructed person. ”

“ Well, that is the sort of illumination which the lunar man will enjoy under these circumstances; all the features of his country will be brightly lighted up by the full earth. Of course, this earth-lighted side of the moon cannot be compared in brilliancy with the sun-lighted side, but the brightness will still be perceptible, so that when from the earth we look at the moon, we see this glow distributed all over the dark portion; that is, we observe the feebly lighted globe clasped in the brilliant arms of the crescent. ”

“ He denominates the man in the moon "an imaginary being, the subject of perhaps one of the most ancient, as well as one of the most popular, superstitions of the world." [8] And as we must explore the vestiges of antiquity, Asiatic and European, African and American, and even Polynesian, we bespeak patient forbearance and attention. One little particular we may partly clear up at once, though it will meet us again in another connection. ”

“ Having promised a contribution to light literature, we shall give to fancy a free rein, and levy taxes upon poets and story-tellers, wits and humorists wherever they may be of service. Much will have to be said, in the first place, of the man in the moon, whom we must view as he has been manifested in the mask of mirth, and also in the mirror of mythology. Then we shall present the woman in the moon, who is less known than the immortal man. Next a hare will be started; afterwards a frog, and other objects ”

“ Whether the man in the moon have a body like our own, whether his breathing apparatus, his digestive functions, and his cerebral organs, be identical with ours, are matters of secondary moment. The Fabricator of terrestrial organizations has limited himself to no one type or form, why then should man be the model of beings in distant worlds? Be the man in the moon a biped or quadruped ”

“ These beings with big heads, on whom the intellectual labours fall, form a sort of aristocracy in this strange society, and at the head of them, quintessential of the moon, is that marvellous gigantic ganglion the Grand Lunar, into whose presence I am finally to come. The unlimited development of the minds of the intellectual class is rendered possible by the absence of any bony skull in the lunar anatomy, that strange box of bone that clamps about the developing brain of man, imperiously insisting 'thus far and no farther' to all his possibilities. ”

“ The Moon is very beautiful with his round, bright face which shines with soft and gentle light on all the world of man. But once there was a time when he was not so beautiful as he is now. Six thousand years ago the face of the Moon became changed in a single night. ”

“ Wilson, formerly curate of Halton Gill, near Skipton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, in the last century wrote a tract entitled The Man in the Moon, which was seriously meant to convey the knowledge of common astronomy in the following strange vehicle: A cobbler, Israel Jobson by name, is supposed to ascend first to the top of Penniguit; and thence, as a second stage equally practicable, to the moon; after which he makes the grand tour of the whole solar system. ”

“ At last, the distance had become so great that, of this lunar world so wonderful, so fantastic, so weird, so mysterious, our travellers by degrees lost even the consciousness, and their sensations, lately so vivid, grew fainter and fainter, until finally they resembled those of a man who is suddenly awakened from a peculiarly strange and impressive dream. ”

“ Fearing, however, lest the date of departure should make some suspicious that the author was desirous of making his readers April fools, we leave this aërial tourist to pursue his explorations without our company, and listen to a learned bishop, who ought to be a canonical authority, for the man in the moon himself is an overseer of men. ”

“ The moon was everywhere, filling all the hollow over-world, and for ever alighting on their heads. Far away they saw the house, a remote something, scarce existent in the dreaming night, the gracious-ghastly poem, and the mingling, harmonizing moon. It was much too far away to give them an anxious thought, and for long it seemed, like death, to be coming no nearer ”

“ It is naturally painful to conclude that the Moon is and always has been deprived of those features of existence which we deem the nobler; that it has never known the stir of air or water or the higher life of beings who inherit the profit of experience, and thereby climb the way that has led upward to man. That these large gifts have been denied to the nearest companion of the earth has its lesson for the naturalist. ”

“ So in looking at these spectacles in the moon we cannot but be interested by the reflection that they are reminders and relics of a wonderful history, whatever its precise character may have been. The moon seems to me to stand for the most affecting of all tragedies—the passing of a world. When I survey its extraordinary landscapes, it is like looking upon a long-abandoned stage, whose actors are in their graves, whose scenery is moldering under a gaping roof, whose machinery is broken, whose very traditions are forgotten, but which yet retains a semblance of its former brilliance. ”

“ Will put a man on the moon.
But don't complain of empty pockets or empty pantries.
Think of all those sexy rockets sitting on their gantries.
We're proud of every orbit,
And I hope you're doing your bit
To help us land there soon.
Let's crack down on all tax dodgers
So some nut can play Buck Rogers,
When we put a man on the moon.
Note: The first man on the moon was Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969. ”

“ How answer those savants whose sight had penetrated the abyss of Pluto's circle? How contradict those bold ones whom the chances of their enterprise had borne over that invisible face of the disc, which no human eye until then had ever seen? It was now their turn to impose some limit on that Selenographic science, which had reconstructed the lunar world as Cuvier did the skeleton of a fossil, and say, "The moon was this, a habitable world, inhabited before the earth! The moon is that, a world uninhabitable, and now uninhabited." ”

“ We don't know lots of things, Adam. All we know is that we need the moon. It's a matter of survival of Western Man, his culture, his way of life, his political integrity. We need the moon to conquer the planets ... ”

“ Suppose that animals people these continents and seas? Suppose that man still lives under those conditions of habitability? How many questions there were it would have been interesting to solve! What solutions might have been drawn from the contemplation of that hemisphere! What delight it would have been to glance at that world which no human eye has seen!
The disappointment of the travellers in the midst of this darkness may be imagined. All observation of the lunar disc was prevented. ”

“ While such a moon is beaming,
'Tis wrong towards Heaven to sleep.
If e'er the fates should sever
My life and hopes from thee, love,
The sleep that lasts for ever
Would then be sweet to me, love;
But now,—away with dreaming!
Till darker hours 'twill keep;
While such a moon is beaming,
'Tis wrong towards Heaven to sleep.
THE BOY OF THE ALPS. Lightly, Alpine rover,
Tread the mountains over;
Rude is the path thou'st yet to go;
Snow cliffs hanging o'er thee,
Fields of ice before thee,
While the hid torrent moans below.
Hark, the deep thunder,
Thro' the vales yonder! ”

“ Should the planet happen to be at the height of her splendour when the ceremony is performed, their future life will be a scene of festivity, and all its paths strewed over with rosebuds of delight. But when her tapering horns are turned towards the north, passion becomes frost-bound, and seldom thaws till the genial season again approaches. From the moon they not only draw prognostications of the weather, but according to their creed also discover future events. ”

“ The moon is the center of our terrestrial individuality in the cosmos. She is the declaration of our existence in separateness. Save for the intense white recoil of the moon, the earth would stagger towards the sun. The moon holds us to our own cosmic individuality, as a world individual in space. She is the fierce center of retraction, of frictional withdrawal into separateness. She it is who sullenly stands with her back to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. ”

“ The general superstition with regard to the spots in the moon may briefly be summed up thus: A man is located in the moon; he is a thief or Sabbath-breaker [8] ; he has a pole over his shoulder, from which is suspended a bundle of sticks or thorns. In some places a woman is believed to accompany him, and she has a butter-tub with her ”

“ Man was an epitome of all this; and as the functions of the less were held to correspond with the functions of the greater, the microcosm with the macrocosm, man's movements could be inferred by first ascertaining the motions of the universe. The moon, having dominion in the twelve "houses" of heaven, through which she passed in the course of the year, her aspects to the other bodies were considered as of prime significance, in indicating benignant or malignant influences upon human life. ”

“ Some force not himself impels him, and go he must. But why? Why? Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the things of another world, I took count of all my life. Assuming I was to die a castaway upon the moon, I failed altogether to see what purpose I had served. ”

“ He then told me, no doubt in compliment also, the relative magnitude and diameter of earth and moon, and the perpetual wonder and speculation with which the Selenites had regarded our planet. I meditated with downcast eyes, and decided to reply that men too had wondered what might lie in the moon, and had judged it dead, little recking of such magnificence as I had seen that day. The Grand Lunar, in token of recognition, caused his long blue rays to rotate in a very confusing manner, and all about the great hall ran the pipings and whisperings and rustlings of the report of what I had said. ”