THE APOLLO 11 mission of 40 years ago is one of those moments, like the Kennedy assassinations, that people who were alive at the time relate to by remembering where they were. I was atop a sycamore tree overlooking the river Suck, writes JOHN WATERS
We didn’t have TV and my plans to watch the moon landings came unstuck because the neighbour who often let me watch his set had visitors that day. I walked around thinking about what was about to happen and put my eye upon the tree. Other boys had climbed it, but I had never seen anyone go right to the top. I timed my assault for the precise moment Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were due to walk out on the surface of the moon.
I wasn’t looking for a means to remember. Perhaps at some level I understood the Apollo mission as a way of getting closer to God. Or, perhaps I was seeking to go some place no man had gone before.
Actually, as John Gray has observed, both responses are “religious” – the idea of faith in human progress just as much as belief in a higher intelligence. Both seek to transcend what is “obvious”. We seem to hold both perspectives within us, moving between them. Perhaps they represent not opposites, but a single complex mechanism for dealing with our situation, ostensibly improvable but essentially fixed, and ultimately mysterious.
There was a great educational rage back then for essays about where all this progress was leading, and we would duly produce fantastic extrapolations based on the idea of mankind on the run home to mastery over creation. Most of us foresaw our future selves hovering between skyscrapers in flying saucers, swallowing pills when we were hungry and wearing clothes that, now I come to think of it, were very like those worn by Armstrong and Aldrin that day. Suffusing these projections was a sense of ease, peace, happiness.
A superficial review of the intervening decades might lead one to conclude that these projections have been vindicated, in the spirit if not the letter. We are certainly more technologised, though in somewhat different ways than we anticipated.
It is not that things have unfolded more slowly than expected, but that they have evolved more in line with what we were actually like than how we fancied ourselves. Our cars, to take a banal example, resemble more what we were driving then than what we then imagined we might be driving now.
Nor did we foresee, understanding ourselves on the cusp of an unprecedented and possibly definitive age of human advancement, how little technology would change us fundamentally. We might have done well to ponder Freud’s parable: if you would understand what makes humans happy, put your foot outside the blankets on a cold night, leave it there awhile and pull it in again. This is happiness, defined not by absolute gains but by comparison with what we have.
Perhaps the most salutary image we received that hazy July day was not of the magnificent desolation of the moon face, but the poignant perspective from that vantage point showing planet Earth, apparently suspended in space, humanity balanced perilously on its surface. No image has more beautifully captured the fragility of human hopes for omnipotence, or of man, imprisoned within his desires, doomed to sabotage his own efforts by misusing his freedom.
And what a trick was played on us that day, as though in a conspiracy between technology and the ether! For months beforehand, a special Nasa sub-committee had been canvassing opinions with a view to formulating the first words to be uttered by the first human to walk on the moon. Presently, Neil Armstrong was given a memo with the agreed phrase. When the moment came, he faithfully recited the words.
On Earth he was heard to say: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. This is what the recording recalls. But when you think about it, this makes no sense, because the words “man” and “mankind”, taken in context, mean exactly the same thing.
Thinking the words spontaneous, we glossed over the tautology. We knew what he meant. But what the recording attests is not what Armstrong said. The voice-activated transmission system momentarily cut out after the fourth word, tracelessly excising the indefinite article that would have made sense, and retained the humility, of the agreed phrase. “One small step for a man . . .” is what Armstrong was instructed to say, and what he insisted he did say.
It is as though something in time or space, or space-time, intervened to underline the distinction between what a human being can achieve from within an understanding of human nature and what we tend to extrapolate from these achievements about our collective and absolute potential. Perhaps, snipping out that fragile “a” to emphasise the tautological nature of human ambition, some benevolent force was whispering to us about the folly of thinking that we can climb out of our essential condition, gently reminding us that we make better progress when we think of getting closer to God.