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OUT OF THIS WORLD WITH CHAUCER AND THE ASTRONAUTS

When you overcome the earth the stars will be yours.

— BOETHIUS, The Consolation of Philosophy

The night Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, I was lost on some western branch of the German freeway system. I hadn’t heard the news in weeks, and it was dark, cold for July, raining hard. With my small collection of words from half a dozen languages, I worked through the lot of a sprawling truckstop, tapping on doors of the big rigs to ask “Al nord? Dirección Danmark?” I was getting nowhere, when the Italian driver of a melon truck gave me a smile.

“You American? Eh, beautiful! You see la moon?” He pointed. The clouds had thinned out. “My radio, it say she belong to you. Apollo. . . . But the Denmark, no. Hey, good luck for you!” I turned to look up at the moon. He pulled the door shut, and I crawled off into a thicket of birches to shiver through the long night in my sleeping bag, spellbound by the moon.

What will we call home one century from now—a thicket, a nation, the Earth itself? According to a common proverb in the Middle Ages, “Most of us are at home one place on Earth, while experienced travelers are at home many places on Earth. But the truly wise are at home no place on Earth.” In that time, people thought life on Earth could only tarnish the soul. The Earth itself was corrupt, and ultimately doomed, along with those too devoted to it. Home was in heaven, and the Earth was only a perilous stopover on the soul’s pilgrimage.

This attitude of contempt for the Earth had its own tradition of travel literature (providing the seeds for today’s science fiction), in which a human soul casts off the body’s husk in sleep or death and flies toward heaven, turning back just in time to see the world, pitifully small and poor as a freckle on the void.

I was lost in Germany, but we are lost on Earth unless we decide what we will call home. We can begin to consider what our home might be like—and to assess what we value as home—by visiting some of these early travel accounts by Cicero, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, and others. In certain ways these imaginative journeys of the past are remarkably similar to the actual travels by astronauts of our own time. We can read the image that came from Cicero’s reed pen as a prophetic simulation for Apollo 11, just as the space programs of the last twenty years may prefigure the human mission in the next century.

Before Copernicus, before Christ, in the first century B.C. when Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a political tract called De re publica, his sense of politics involved both the duties of the individual citizen and the plan of the cosmos. In the final chapter of his book, a character from Roman history named Scipio Africanus the Younger dreams that he has sailed out toward the stars to learn his destiny. It’s wonderful out there for Scipio, and like the astronauts of our own time he reports that “the blazing stars” are far brighter than what we see from Earth. As he hovers, amazed among the stars, the spirit-forms of his father and grandfather appear, terrifying him, but then assuring and informing him: he should strive, they say, in the work of the Empire, for nothing is dearer “to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the establishment of federations bound together by principles of justice.” But as he listens, Scipio turns and looks back, and is struck by the size of the distant Earth—“so small that I was ashamed of our Empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its surface.”

Cicero was right to be skeptical about the Empire; for all his service to the state, when political enemies seized control they nailed his severed head and right hand to the podium from which he had so often—and so eloquently—addressed the Roman citizens. His “Dream of Scipio” survived, however, as a famous example of cosmology and dream-literature. The ability of this work to look simultaneously inward in dream, backward in history, and outward in cosmology was a model to be copied by medieval writers for centuries. Through the edition and commentary of a fourth-century writer named Macrobius, Scipio’s Dream was known intimately by everyone seriously interested in astronomy through the seventeenth century. This included Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Kepler, and others who copied the Dream in their works. Even today, Cicero’s way of looking at Earth from outside the atmosphere and yet inside the mind recurs. Though Michael Collins (the third member of the Apollo 11 team) probably never read Cicero, he describes a mental journey toward the stars in words similar to Cicero’s: “I can now lift my mind out into space and look back at a midget Earth. I can see it hanging there in the relentless sunlight.” The conclusion Collins draws from that perspective also echoes Cicero: “I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let’s say, 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced.”

The early fourteenth century in Italy was a time of very noisy human argument. That tiny, distant world was what Dante, lifted toward heaven in his Divine Comedy, called “the threshing floor that makes us so ferocious,” as he glanced back at Earth from the constellation Gemini. Gemini (besides being the name of five American missions into space in 1965) was Dante’s astrological birth-sign. He was in exile from his native city of Florence when he wrote about the small, scarred floor of Earth. Like Cicero, he sensed his true home among the stars, and in his vision he did not look back at Earth with longing or regret, but with relief to be away. Earth was a distant chapter in his past.

Another cosmic traveler eager to be away was the hero of Chaucer’s courtly romance, Troilus and Criseyde. At the close of this story, the Trojan knight and lover Troilus has been killed in battle by Achilles, and his heaven-bound spirit flies up through the eight concentric spheres of the medieval cosmos, brushing aside the four material elements of earth, water, air, and fire, until he bursts out into the realm of the fixed stars and hears the “hevenyssh melodie” that drives the universe. Then he turns and glances back at the Earth:

And when he was slain in this way

His light spirit blissfully rose

Up to the hollowness of the eighth sphere,

Leaving behind on either side the elements;

And beyond he saw with utter attention

The wandering planets, harkening to harmony

With sounds of heaven’s melody.

And down from there he eagerly studied

This little spot of earth, that by the sea

Is embraced, and he totally despised

This wretched world, and held all vanity

Compared to the sheer happiness

That is in heaven above.

Especially in my translation, perhaps, this is one of the soberest passages in Chaucer, and some readers have doubted that the author of the Canterbury Tales actually wrote it. In a sense, he did not. He only borrowed it from Macrobius, who borrowed it from Cicero, who borrowed it from Lucretius, who borrowed it from Plato, who got it from the Muse. Actually, Chaucer’s Troilus is himself quite jolly at this point: “within himself he laughed at the sorrow / Of those who wept so sincerely for his death.” Their concerns are so distant, so tiny, blind, absurd. Troilus is jolly at the expense of those he left behind—the wretched Earth and its citizens.

With Milton in the seventeenth century, the traditional language of Cicero’s cosmic vision remained, but the attitude toward the value of the Earth began to change. Where Chaucer’s Troilus despised “this litel spot of erthe,” in Paradise Lost the angel Raphael tells Adam,

. . . this earth a spot, a grain,

An atom, with the firmament compared . . .

Though, in comparison of Heav’n, so small,

Nor glistering, may of solid good contain

More plenty than the sun that barren shines

Whose virtue on itself works no effect

But in the fruitful Earth.

Maybe it was Milton’s blindness that brought this change of heart. Maybe it was the chill distances of space that Galileo’s telescope and Kepler’s mathematics had begun to actualize. Something made Milton and his contemporaries begin to imagine that from out in space the Earth would be small, yes, very small—but somehow winsome, fertile, a garden for a good life. The Earth had been small for Cicero, but therefore worthless. For Milton’s Raphael, the tiny atom of Earth holds Eden, and is a kind of heaven in small. From Milton and those who followed him, we inherit both the vision of Earth’s smallness and a sense of empathy with it. A hundred years after Milton, cosmic travelers in Voltaire’s Micromegas first sight the Earth from space: “they discerned a small speck, which was the Earth. Coming from Jupiter, they could not but be moved with compassion at the sight of this miserable spot, upon which, however, they resolved to land.”

Cosmic travel literature continued from the seventeenth century with an increasing interest in the technology thought to be required for such journeys. Johannes Kepler, best known for his discovery of the elliptical paths and other mathematical principles of planetary motion, wrote a Ciceronean Dream in which an Icelandic “dæmon” directs human passengers to the moon. Each must be drugged, protected from cold, assisted with breathing, and bunched like a frightened spider (or human embryo) to survive the trip. (This scientific allegory back-fired when it was used as evidence to condemn Kepler’s mother as a witch; she was thrown into prison in chains.) Cyrano de Bergerac, on the other hand, imagined a series of flasks filled with dew and strapped onto the traveler’s chest; when the sun warms the dew, it evaporates and rises, lifting the traveler away in this bright harness. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver describes the spindled magnet that lifts and guides the airborne island of Laputa, while Jules Verne’s first moon-travelers climb inside a gigantic bullet, to be fired from a cannon sunk five hundred feet into the ground near Tampa, Florida. Somehow, all these travelers survive.

Despite technology, Scipio’s dream-journey into space still seems to hover in the background for twentieth-century science fiction. For the character named Bedford in The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells, take-off is less technological than psychological: “I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.” Similarly, the religious themes of Dante, Chaucer, and Milton reappear in more recent science fiction works like those co-authored by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (a NASA scientist turned writer): The Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer. Even modern literature set on Earth may take a cosmic view:

Wait! One more look. Good-by, good-by world. Good-by Grover’s Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

For contemporary audiences of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, our town is the Earth itself; but this Earth is no longer the shameful speck of Cicero’s vision. It is home.

“Colors startled me . . . an extraordinary array of vivid hues that were strangely gentle in their play across the receding surface of the world.” Gherman Stepanovich Titov so remembers his view of the Earth as he circled it seventeen times in 1961. The early missions went so fast, and were so filled with strict concentration on the flight controls, that the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had little time for sustained meditation on the Earth below them—John Glenn seeking out the buttons with the tiny red lights taped to his fingertips, and Yuri Gagarin glancing only at the Earth’s “very characteristic and very beautiful blue halo.”

When the Apollo program began in 1967, astronauts got far enough from Earth and had enough time in space to really stand in Scipio’s shoes. On March 5, 1969, Russell “Rusty” Schweickart climbed out of the Apollo 9 spacecraft over 100,000 miles from Earth. He was wearing a two-million dollar suit designed—by skill and hope—to protect him from the dangers of space. Unlike the Gemini astronauts, Schweickart had no umbilical oxygen tube leading back to the mother ship, only a simple tether. For this EVA (extra-vehicular activity), he was really outside and alone. As he stood in what they called the “golden slippers”—foot pads painted with pure gold to protect them from the searing rays of the sun—and as he gazed down long and carefully at Earth, he first told his companions inside Apollo, “That’s what you call a view from the top of the stairs.”

He was Scipio, he was Troilus, he was the angel Raphael. But what Troilus despised as “this litel spot of erthe,” Schweickart saw in an utterly different way. “There are no frames and no boundaries,” he said later of the Earth. “That little spot you could cover with your thumb—it’s everything.”

Behind him had been the light-year distant stars, the silent fire of the sun, the moon whirling on its path; yet the soft blue spot of Earth he turned to was everything.

There was a similar moment as the Apollo 11 lunar entry module started its final descent toward the moon. As the altitude of the module began to drop and Neil Armstrong’s heartbeat began to rise—from a normal 77 to a high of 156 at touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility—and as the last flurry of technical decisions had to be carried out, as the radio system began, for some reason, to fade at this moment, Buzz Aldrin fired off a sentence to Mission Control that had nothing to do with the potential emergency at hand: “Got the Earth right out our front window.”

It was Aldrin who later spent a part of the precious hours on the moon taking bread, wine, and a Bible from his personal preference kit, and celebrating communion. But his sentence in the midst of descent was less religious than it was a simple recognition. There was the Earth. So that’s it? Like the copy of Pushkin’s poetry that Titov smuggled into his two week stint in the space-simulation “Deaf Room,” a habitual idea like home can be tucked away in the survival kit of the mind. A long journey can produce a simple discovery. For James Lovell, commander of the aborted Apollo 13 (which was partially disabled by an explosion on the outward journey, then circled the moon and somehow made it home), it came to this: “We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.”

If space-travel helps us to see what we have on Earth by seeing what the cold void lacks, then the astronauts follow Cicero in telling us something crucial about life on Earth. But their message has been read in very different ways. On one side are the advocates of what a third-grader, in a spectacular spelling discovery, once called “the plant earth.” Here we have Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth”; the cover image and philosophy of the Whole Earth Catalog; and the contemporary scientists who see Gaia, the Earth, as a single organism maintaining its own life in a way impossible anywhere else. This is home. We must not defile or annihilate this planet, for we are inseparable from it. “It’s everything.”

On the other side are those who begin with the assumption that we will destroy the Earth, and that we must scramble into some kind of exodus very soon. Edward Gilfillan, a scientist once associated with NASA, writes that the Earth should be seen as “merely an overnight campsite along the way; confused, troublesome, unsatisfactory, but unimportant; an untidy place to be abandoned and forgotten.” The writer Ray Bradbury told an Italian reporter,

Homer will die. Michelangelo will die. Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein will die, all those will die who now are not dead because we are alive, we are thinking of them, we are carrying them within us. And then every single thing, every memory, will hurtle down into the void with us. So let us save them, let us save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not be long of this Earth.

The most chilling word here is Bradbury’s tiny preposition: “not long of this Earth.” Bradbury could have said, “not long on this Earth,” implying that departure would be a movement from this place to another. If we are “not long of this Earth,” however, our identity is fully independent of it. Ray Bradbury is a careful writer. He knows what he says: the Earth is our campsite only.

And Pope Pius XII told Wernher von Braun (who helped Hitler, and later the United States, to develop rocket technology), “The Lord . . . had no intention of setting a limit to inquiry when He said Ye shall have dominion over the earth. It is all creation which He has entrusted to man and which He has given to the human mind, to penetrate it.” According to these views, certain human problems will not be solved on Earth, and the Earth may become the victim of our inability to solve them.

In Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a character announces that “Humanly speaking, every possible precaution has been taken to bring this rash experiment to a successful termination.” Later in the novel, we learn that the scientists did think of everything—except how the projectile with three men inside might return to Earth.

“It is all very well to go to the moon, but how to get back again?” says one of the three as they hurtle outward into space.

“The question has no real interest,” replies Barbicane, president of the Gun Club which has sponsored the mission. “Later, when we think it advisable to return, we will take counsel together.”

So stories go. So our lives go, unless we take counsel together.

We need to take counsel with Cicero before his head is nailed to the rostrum, with Jules and Buzz and Raphael. We must take counsel in many languages. We must speak sternly to our heroes, and listen to our children.

The splashdown of American astronauts far out at sea, their welcoming by a President, a commander, a team of doctors and soldiers to guard their quarantine—all the modern version of Barbicane’s Gun Club—is shockingly different from Titov’s return. Titov landed on the ground, at the heart of Asia. No one knew where he would come down, and every citizen was out to find him. When Titov’s parachute bumped his capsule back to earth and he opened the hatch, a woman ecstatic with blood on her face leaped from her car to kiss him. Driving, she had seen his little ship descending. She had driven into the ditch by the road in her haste to touch him. She ran toward his ship. He lived on Earth again, and she welcomed him.

Three days after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I made it to Denmark. It was good to stop in one place a few days; it was a relief not to hitchhike, not to climb into anyone’s machine and live at the mercy of their speed. Near the town of Århus, I met a girl named Helle. From her parents’ house we took bicycles along the path that wove past flashing streams, dark woods, through meadows thick with sunlight. The grasshoppers still had something to sing about, after so many generations. We were young, foolish, happy. As I drifted ahead around a long curve above the water, she called out, “Wherever heaven is, it must be like this.”

I turn to look.