THE SHADOWS MOVING IN THE MOON'S SKULL EYES

Lago (Grand Canyon, 2015, etc.) imagines the moon landing from the moon’s perspective in this work of creative nonfiction.

The cratered surface of the moon may seem alien to people who are used to the landscapes of Earth, but in the grand scheme of things, its appearance represents the norm: “The whole universe is like the moon, chaotic and lifeless and mindless,” writes Lago in his prologue. “This is a universe of craters, of planets and moons saturated with craters, craters within craters, craters atop craters, craters ruining other craters.” Lago had this realization while watching a lunar eclipse in Verdun, France, where the craters made by World War I ordnance still pockmark the landscape—proof, perhaps, that mankind has internalized some universal forces of destruction. What follows is a meditation on what Earth looks like from the moon, particularly that strange time when an “asteroid” from our planet landed on the lunar surface—and two astronauts got out of it and began walking around. What must the moon have made of this strange encounter as it was presented with such oddities as symmetrical objects, gaseous oxygen, artificial light, and living organisms? How odd was it for its dust, which had sat undisturbed for millions of years, to suddenly take the shape of human footprints? Lago uses the moon to dislocate readers and ask them to consider everything from a new and remote perspective—from the effect of the moon’s gravity on water in the astronauts’ bodies to the moon’s relationship to calcium, gold, and glass to its role in the lives of owls and luna moths and its distinctly inhuman sense of silence and time. “Through the moon’s grey, cratered mirror,” he writes, evoking the epiphanies of Apollo XI astronauts, “we might finally be able to see ourselves clearly.” Lago’s prose is as controlled as a lunar module, and it often becomes quite lyrical: “The astronaut breathed deeply, deep into time, deep into Earth, deep into life, breathed with the lungs of whales, the throats of giraffes, the mouths of Rex, the noses of elephants, the voices of wrens, tapping the holy, cosmic winds that had given life to the gods themselves.” The author also slyly packs in quite a bit of information, including an explanation of moonquakes, a look at magnesium’s functions on Earth and on the moon, and an accounting of various lunar goddesses in human mythologies. Lago appears less interested in specific facts, however, than he is in capturing larger, less comprehensible properties of the moon and of existence in general. He divides the book into short chapters, each one a riff on a specific idea, such as what the concept of zero might mean on the moon; some are closer to poetic meditations. As such, the book’s style may not be every reader’s cup of tea, but it is successful in making the moon feel simultaneously alien and tactile. One can almost feel the moon dust between one’s fingers.

An original, impressionistic take on man’s first brief, off-world encounter.