Notice Me, Moon.

There are things outside of the control of a single person. Some things are too great to grasp, and even if understood still lie outside of our control. One has no control over the moon, no affect nor effect on the moon. There have been people thrown onto the moon, long ago, but that’s as far as we have gotten. We left footprints on the beach of the empty seas and a striped flag, but I don’t think the moon even noticed. Just as Mr. Palomar observed, the moon continued regularly without regard for humanity’s desperate attempts for its attention. Most people, when you stand on top of them, become upset and say something like, “Hey, stop standing on me, jerk!” but the moon didn’t even say a word. It is outside of our control. The moon will never notice us as we notice the moon. The moon will never reciprocate our indelible beholding of itself. We can’t help but notice a thing’s features when we see it. Our eyes do not lie. 

“...there is no doubt that the moon bears them [spots], like stains or bruises, and they can no longer be taken for transparencies of the sky’s ground, rips in the cloak of a bodiless ghost moon.”

I think, by this, Italo Calvino means to say that as reality comes into focus we see reality. Simply that. Reality is something most skillfully obscured by people, but the reality is what it is at all times that it is being itself, which it always is. When reality changes, we either notice it or do not, but that does not mean we cannot deny it. I think, in a way, this is what makes us wish that reality might notice us back. Validate our observations first hand. Tell us that what we have observed is reflective of reality. We learn of the world because we hope we need each other, because, insofar, it seems only we need the world, and the world does not need us. Yet, in the face of this, I believe, as does Mr. Palomar, and presumably Calvino, that the world does need us. Moon in the Afternoon is bookended like so: 

 “Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.”

And

“At this point, assured that the moon no longer needs him, Mr. Palomar goes home.”

These lines ascribe the moon, and reality by extension, a need to be observed. That, although we wish for reality to notice us and validate our own existence, it will not, yet that does not diminish our responsibility to provide the universe with that same kindness that it fails to show us. It is our responsibility to validate the existence of reality because it is what we would want reality to do for us. It is why we want the moon to notice us when we jam flags into its head. It is why we want to leave our mark on the world. It is why we want to be remembered after we die. We want reality to acknowledge us as we acknowledge it. We want to be noticed.



My comment on Syd's writing: I think that habits are a form of change also too subtle to notice while it is occurring. They say that it takes about two weeks to turn a behavior into a habit. Most habits that people develop seem to be ones that developed unintentionally. It's like a slow decision, and by the time you've made a new habit, you've hardly had to time to realize that you made the decision not to stop, you know? Maybe habits are just these subtle changes you describe, but in one's self.

My comment on Ali's writing: Maybe, in a way, Mr. Palomar is simply a personification of the scientific spirit. Not the scientific spirit in some highfalutin sense, but in the simple sense of a drive that makes us want to simply know what is. Like, what is behind a curtain? What is around the corner? Not even how to do something or why something is what it is, but just wondering what is and what isn't. Mr. Palomar just wants to know what the moon is, in a sense.