The moon can be dangerous. Its days and its nights last fourteen of our terrestrial days each. There is no protective atmosphere shielding it from the naked sun and the cold of space, so the surface will be thirty-five centigrade degrees above the boiling point of water at high noon, and colder than dry ice at midnight. The lack of a diffusing atmosphere means that shadows will be razor-sharp, inky-black and impenetrable to the eye. You may step on what you think is the shadow of a boulder and tumble into a deep pit.
You will have to wear protective armor, of course. The extra weight of the armor will make it easier for you to walk. It will carry an oxygen supply: It will protect you from the extremes of heat and cold. And it will shield you from the minuscule meteorites that strike the moon at better than twenty-six miles a second. The friction of our terrestrial atmosphere burns most of them up before they reach the ground. Not so on the moon.
Ah, but the views you will have! To see the Earth hanging dark blue and cloud-mantled in the black sky. The sun, blazing against the velvety black, displaying its rosy chromosphere and ragged corona shading from pale-yellow to pearly white. The multitudes of stars, millions more than show through our dense atmosphere, steady, unwinking, their spectral colors bright. There will, of course, be a giant astronomical observatory on the moon, and you must go there during visitors' hours.
You will find adventure, excitement, unique beauty, anything and everything new and strange on the moon, but you will not find lunar aborigines. You will also probably not find diamonds.
Holiday, July 1969
The Sun
Heat, light, energy, nutriment, rainbows, night, day.
—Reflections of a Worshiper
I remember a story by G. K. Chesterton about a street that became angry with a man because he took it for granted, and wrought a strange revenge. I sometimes wonder what would happen if the sun became angry with us for the same reason. I don't think it likely. We have inherited a profound respect for him that reaches back to the dawn of life.
The sun is the father of our entire existence. We live sunlight. We eat and drink sunlight, breathe sunlight, burn sunlight, love it, shun it, enjoy the seasons because of it, swear at it when it fails us, bless it when it beams on us. Worship, love and fear of the sun embroider the cultural fabric of the world. The aborigines of England built the monument of Stonehenge to pay homage to the summer solstice. The Egyptians worshiped Ra, the sun god. The Incas tore the living hearts from sacrifices to the sun. The modern world spends billions of dollars on sun-worship.
Madison Avenue advertising experts have a little trade joke going for them; they'll ask you what's most often photographed in TV commercials. The answer is not, as you might think, the products they are selling; it's the sun. For reasons which no one yet understands, photographers of the artsy type invariably shoot footage of the sun; at dawn, at sunset, high overhead, reflected in water, blazing behind planes, skyscrapers, people. Incidentally, the second-most-often-photographed subject in TV commercials is ladies' bottoms, usually in bikinis.
The combination of the sun and a bikini immediately conjures up travel to the south, and it's true that peoples living in the north have a long tradition of heading for the sun during the winter. Anyone who's lived in London (51° 30' N.), New York (40° 45' N.) or Moscow (56° N.) through a dark January and February will understand that. It isn't so much the cold, it's the gloom. The body begins to hunger for sunlight, and the entire psyche can become quite desperate, which may be why Denmark has such a high suicide rate.
So everyone who can afford it goes south in the winter. They go to the beach in summer. They also go to lake country, mountain country; they go to ski centers and sunbathe alongside heated pools; they go to any sort of resort where they can flake out and relax in the sun. This is the medicinal sun, essential for our metabolism and our souls. As far back as the Middle Ages doctors knew enough to drag the sick and the wounded out into the sun for a few hours each day. Ibsen, a perceptive playwright, understood what he was about when he selected the tag-line to wrap up Ghosts, his tragedy about a son who inherits the rot of a dissolute father. When the poor kid's brain falls apart, all he can do is mumble, "Mother, give me the sun. The sun—the sun!" Curtain.
The modern quest for the sun has built tremendous industries; resort travel, resort hotels, resort fashions, resort entertainment, resort sports. The quest imposes amusing imperatives on the sun-hungry. If your assistant starts a crash diet on January 2nd, you can be pretty sure she's planning a February holiday near the equator and is worried about how she'll look on the beach. If she goes on another diet around May 1st, she's worried about how she'll look in sun clothes up north during summer weekends. January and May are the months for soul-searching tryings-on of bathing suits, accompanied by a vox humana of groans and the rasp of burst zippers. The men also diet and go to health clubs.
This passion for slenderness is a trial for a guy like me who isn't willing to pay the price of looking at a drawn and haggard face on top of an elegant model's figure. Anyway, I like all sorts and shapes and sizes of girls. Out at our beach I used to sit with Wolcott Gibbs (who wrote the Fire Island play, Season in The Sun) and case the girls strolling on the sand. Wolcott loved the slender ones in bikinis. I did, too, but I also loved the zahftig girls who threatened to bounce out at every step.
All this is merely by way of mentioning the sun as an aphrodisiac. There is something about sunlight that releases inhibitions. Darkness stifles the soul. It's no wonder that Calvinism took deep root in Scotland. In his play, The Exiles, Joyce speaks of "the protestant strain—gloom, seriousness, righteousness." He was, of course, referring to the English Puritans. Can anyone imagine Calvinism or Puritanism taking root anywhere on the shores of the Mediterranean? These sun-drenched lands are the home of hedonism.
Yes, those big, fair Swedish girls come down to the Mediterranean islands, fling themselves stark naked one the sand, and strong men sob. Don't misunderstand. It isn't the mere fact of nudity that does it, or that the girls are beautiful, or that they have a reputation for free and easy love affairs. Essentially it's the combination of bodies and sunlight that starts the juices flowing.
I know this sounds absurd; but I'm willing to bet that if you were sittings behind your desk in your office, and a big, fair girl came in and flang herself stark naked on your carpet, your immediate reaction would be one of exasperation; wrong time, wrong place, wrong girl. But out in the sunlight there is no wrong time or wrong place, and every girl is the right girl. Italian fathers know this. When the summer sun roasts Italy, and their young daughters walk around in light cotton shifts, their hair loose, their glowing skins gleaming with perspiration, that's the time to lock the girls up.
There are thousands of cosmetic products on the market for men and women, but if I could have an exclusive franchise, I'd pick the sun; it would be as profitable as a patent on water or the wheel. Jackie Gleason once told me that one of the reasons why he liked to drink was that it blurred his eyes and made all girls look beautiful "It removes pimples and wrinkles," he said. So does the sun.
The sun is our greatest cosmetician, but has only been popular since the 1920s. It's difficult for young people today to understand the tremendous revolution in personal appearance that's taken place since World War I. Back at the turn of the century the beautiful woman never permitted the sun to touch her skin. She was an exquisite white flower, delicate cultivated under glass. She had a "natural" hothouse look and wore no makeup outside of a light dusting of rice powder. Daring young girls sometimes rubbed their cheeks with carnation petals to rouge them, but the real lady contented herself with pinching her cheeks sharply just before she entered a drawing room.
Charles Dana Gibson tried to change that. His Gibson girls idealized a new type: the big, rangy athletic young woman. The Gibson girl was out in the sunlight, playing golf and tennis and motoring, and America fell in love with her image. But there was a limit to how far Gibson would go; his girls were never
tanned by the sun. His men were, to be sure. The Richard Harding Davis he-man, muscular, strong jawed, with a tough skin bronzed by soldier-of-fortune adventures in the tropics, was a popular hero. As a matter of fact, Gibson used Davis himself as a model for many of his drawings.
The revolution took place in the 1920s. Skirts went up, hair was bobbed, people finally acknowledged that they inhabited bodies, and that bodies weren't shameful. They exposed and displayed their bodies in every conceivable manner, including exposure to the sun. And they discovered that the sun was a beautician. Everyone looks the better for a rich suntan, and sun bathing became a ritual, almost a religion.
It begins with sunlamps around the first of the year. The dedicated sunbather wants to get a good start on the summer; the idea of wasting exposure to the sun on sunburn is horrendous. The sunbather must get a good "base" to take advantage of the real thing. Around the middle of March they appear in the parks, seated on benches facing south, their faces thrust up toward the sunlight. Very often they hold aluminum reflectors under their chin.
It's around this time that the suntan lotions begin advertising. The truth is, there is no lotion that will make you tan; the best it can do is shield the skin from too much exposure. There is no way for most people to go from white skin to tanned skin without passing through the sunburn stage. The sunbathers know this, but never give up hope; they buy preparations, concoct secret lotions, and even use dyes which stain the skin with an artificial tan.
The modus operandi of the fanatical sunbather is always amusing. He or she—let's make it she—comes down to the beach carrying a blanket and a beach bag. Her hair is tightly drawn up and tucked under a kerchief which follows the hairline meticulously from nape to brow. First she inspects the sun and the transparency of the sky. What she wants is a brilliant sun, dry air, and just enough breeze to cool the skin. Such days don't come along very often, so she complains. All dedicated sunbathers are chronic complainers about the inadequacy of the sunshine. If you want to infuriate them you need only deliver the ancient cliche, "You can get the worst kind of burn on a day like this."
She carefully spreads her blanket so that her feet will point toward the sun. Every hour or so she will slew the blanket so that her body remains aligned with the sun. Next she takes a bottle of lotion from the beach bag and oils herself liberally, but carefully. Unequal application might result in an uneven tan. Last of all, she puts on a pair of sunglasses with lenses, the size of quarters, stretches out and bathes or, more accurately, rotisserates, for she gives equal time to her front, her back, and her sides.
There are some curious aspects to suntans. They are not all alike, as everyone knows. Brunettes with swarthy skins take a deep dark tan and are the envy of the fair who only succeed in looking hot and flushed after hours of exposure. If you see a blonde with a black tan you can be pretty sure she's a bleach job. The one exception to this rule is the Swedish blondes who take marvelous tans, nobody knows why. Negroes sunburn and tan like everybody else; their dark skins just turn a few shades darker. Beach tans are richer than country tans, possibly because of the way the sea and the sand reflect sunlight and increase its intensity. The concept of the "windburn" is a fable. A windburn is just a plain old sunburn. You can prove it for yourself by taping a square of cellophane to your arm and going for a ride in an open car.
As I said before, we eat sunlight. Take a rocky mountain anywhere in place and time. Nothing will grow on the sterile stone with the exception of moss and lichens, and they make no eating at all. But there are the seasons produced by the sun, and them are rains and snows. Water lodges in the crevices, freezes and expands in the winter, melts and contracts in the summer. The pressures crack and fragment the rock; the rains wash the fragments down to streams and rivers where they are tumbled and crumbled into finer particles of mineral and earth.
They end up as soil deposited on riverbanks, deltas, and eventually in great plains. Seeds root in this soil, grow, and transform soil minerals into starch, carbohydrates and protein under the catalyst of sunlight. When you pick a ripe sun-warmed tomato off a vine and eat it, you are enjoying a history of millions of years of sunlight. When you eat a steak you are eating grass-fed, grain-fed beef which is just one more step in the chain stretching from the sun to us.
Or consider the teeming, churning ocean. In the spring when the sun warms the waters there is a positive explosion of planktonic life; microscopic creatures, fish eggs, larvae, plants, miniature crustaceans, one-celled organisms, all flourishing near the sunlit surface. They devour each other. They are eaten by little fish. Larger fish prey on the smaller, and the chain of sunlight continues until it reaches your table with the cod, the lobster, the swordfish, tuna, salmon, turtle and sturgeon. The chain even crosses over from sea to land, for masses of fish worthless for eating are netted and converted into fertilizer for crops.
Our involvement with the sun has some strange aspects. The rich topsoil of our north central states, which makes them the finest farm and dairy country in the world, was stolen from Canada by the last glacier epoch. The massive wall of glaciation crept south and literally shaved Canada's topsoil off the bedrock, depositing it in Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dako-tas. We know that the glaciation resulted from some anomaly in the intensity of sunlight, although we don't know exactly what it was.
Glaciation is still with us, considerably reduced; this is what accounts far the frozen polar caps which the sun cannot yet melt. If it ever does, the immense quantities of water locked into ice will be released into the oceans, raising the sea-levels, drowning the great coastal cities of New York, London, San Francisco, Hong Kong; and perhaps the high latitudes, both north and south, will become semi-tropics again, as they once were countless millennia ago.
The sun, the sun, the sun! The color of rainbows. Icarus flying too high and plunging to his death when the sun melted his wings. Daguerre's discovery that the sun could print an image on silver, which turned into the photography explosion. The sweet scent of sun-dried laundry. Air pollution, which is debauched sunlight; for the coal and oil that we burn were created by the sun eons ago. Exquisite wines grown on southern slopes. Small boys burning their initials with magnifying glasses. The gilt sunbursts of Louis XIV. Muscle Beach. Autumn sunsets.
The vertical sun of the tropics, so fierce, so dangerous that it is an enemy, to be resisted with broad-brimmed hats, shaded verandas and the armor of white clothing. The parasol, once the exclusive perquisite of royalty. The midnight sun, skimming the horizon. The sun of Stonehenge, that monumental Druid sundial. The Orbiting Solar Observatories, high in space above our protecting blanket of air, peering at Big Daddy, investigating him, analyzing him, observing every kink and foible in his behavior.
How did he come into existence? "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also."
This is all right as far as it goes—nobody will argue with that—but it doesn't go far enough. We like details today. Here, then, is a brief account of how stars are born. You understand, of course, that the sun is a star, a very minor star in the giant galaxy which we inhabit.
Imagine a cloud of gas floating in space. It's an enormous cloud, many light years in diameter. It's a very thin cloud, virtually a vacuum. It is made up mostly of widely scattered hydrogen atoms, the simplest and lightest of elements, believed by many cosmologists to be the original primordial matter from which the entire universe was generated. Since everything in the universe exerts a gravitational attraction on everything else, the atoms and molecules in the cloud attract each other and the gas is slowly compacted. The process takes millions of years. As the compaction and contraction continue, the mass increases in heat or, putting it a little more technically, the hydrogen atoms are excited to higher energy levels as they are crushed closer and closer together. At some point the energy levels are brought so high by this gravitational contraction that a thermonuclear process is begun and the furnace called a
star is born.
This is a continuing process, not to be confused with the "Big Bang" theory of the creation of the universe. The latter postulates that the entire content of the known universe was contained in a giant proto-atom which exploded (reasons not given) into the expanding universe hurtling out into the reaches of space today. Some cosmologists speculate that there may be a limit to the expansion, and that the entire mass will be contracted by gravitational attraction into another proto-atom that will explode all over again. But the generation of stars is merely an item in the overall picture.
In this furnace the atomic sub-particles are split apart, torn asunder, combine with each other, are bombarded and re-combine in a cycle not yet completely understood. With each exchange there is a release of atomic energy which percolates to the sun's surface and is blown out in a gigantic gale called the "solar wind." We see the visible portion of this energy as sunlight, but this is only a small segment of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. There are radio waves, infrared waves, ultraviolet, soft and hard X-ray barrages. There are naked electrons and protons shot out. These are gathered into the Van Allen belts by the Earth's magnetic field, and show themselves as the aurora borealis.
The solar wind is a matter of deep concern to our space program. If its pressure had not been taken into account in our various missions to the moon, Venus and Mars our spacecraft would have missed their targets anywhere from hundreds to thousands of miles. The discovery of the Van Allen belts was a jolt for physicists; they were stunned when they realized that a man could be fried alive when he emerged from the protection of our atmospheric blanket. And the solar wind itself is a source of deadly danger to astronauts. They must be shielded from the inconceivable intensity of solar radiation which can kill a man in a matter of moments.
As the sub-atomic transfers continue, the original hydrogen fuel slowly turns into helium, the next heavier element, and then heavier and heavier elements are produced, always with the release of radiant energy. This is transmutation on a scale never dreamed of by medieval alchemists. Our sun is well into this cycle at present; it's no longer a young hot star, it's more or less a sedate middle-aged star. Its senility and ultimate demise can be guessed.
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