The moon, usually a silver-white disc, was... three-dimensional. Instead of a coin, it was a golden marble to be picked out of the sky. The face spread and dissolved into the jagged irregular maria.
Men walked up there, I kept thinking. There are footsteps in the dust; I can't see them, but they are there. I am looking at the farthest reaches of our collective first-hand adventures in the universe.
And I also remembered the words of Richard Feynman:
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
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