The Man and the Moon

[ed. A couple of fine pieces on Neil Armstrong and his first steps on the moon. For the New Yorker's coverage of what it was like that day in 1969, read E.B. White's Comment: Between the Earth and Moon.]

F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. He didn’t know it, and he couldn’t have guessed it, and it wasn’t his fault; but he was wrong. On the final page of “The Great Gatsby,” he thought—or allowed Nick Carraway to think—of Dutch sailors sighting America, “a fresh, green breast of a new world.” To set foot upon that greenness was not an invasion, but a gasp: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder.” When those words were published, in 1926, it was unfathomable that they might demand revision; but because of what happened forty-three years later, and because of one American who died on Saturday, we need quietly to amend Fitzgerald’s text, and add a single word. Instead of “the last time in history,” make it the second last.

Not that Neil Armstrong had much time for wondering, on July 20, 1969. Especially not around quarter past three, by the Houston clock. He was too busy looking for a parking space. This is never easy, with rush hour coming on, and Eagle—Armstrong’s vehicle of choice, a flimsy little bug of a thing, with Buzz Aldrin in the passenger seat—was still cruising along at quite a lick. Also, for most of the ride, he was upside-down. He flipped over, descended, slowed to forty-eight miles per hour, and went looking for a free bay. There were no other cars, but plenty of rocks the size of cars, which seemed unlikely to pull out and let him in. They had been parked there for a few billion years, and nobody had given them a ticket. So Armstrong switched to “attitude hold” and carried on looking.

In the end, he found his spot on the moon, and his place in history, though both were won with an almost frightening lack of hoopla. If, on landing, he was flustered by the presence, in Eagle’s gas tank, of no more than twenty seconds’ worth of remaining fuel, he didn’t show it.

All the tributes paid Saturday, after his death at the age of eighty-two, took care to stress his modesty, and he certainly belongs to that chastening group of beings whose capacity for heroic action is outstripped only by their reluctance to make a big deal out of it, let alone a profit. But it would entirely wrong to cast him, on the grounds of his natural diffidence, as a hermit; he retreated to no grotto, but became a teacher—still the best way to find, and use, your public voice without being forced to raise it. Nothing is more typical of Armstrong, or more estimable, than his decision not to go into politics; heaven knows what the blandishments, or the invitations, must have been. That is not to deprecate the service rendered by, say, John Glenn, but simply to remind ourselves that political ambition, like our other passions, is in the end a low sublunary affair; and that Armstrong, by dint of being the first man to tread not upon terra firma but upon the gray dust of terra incognita, rose above the fray and stayed there.

by Anthony Lane, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph: NASA