Read Online Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online
Authors: Norman Mailer
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Americans who had been working to back them up. “It’s their success more than ours,” said Armstrong, as if the trip had been completed already, or perhaps this was intended to be the commercial to be employed after touchdown, or lunar ascent, or splashdown. Queried about his private life and the fact that he would lose it after the achievement, he said diffidently, in a voice which would win him twenty million small-town cheers, “I think a private life is possible within the context of such an achievement.” Aquarius’ mind began to wander—he failed to make notes. Recovering attention at some shift in the mood herealized that Armstrong had finished this interview for he was saying “… to take man to another heavenly body … we thank all of you for your help and prayers.”
There was a hand from the TV crew when the cameras stopped. The trade unions once again were backing patriotic and muscular American effort. “Godspeed and good luck, Neil” one of them actually cried out into the wall of the glass, and Armstrong smiled and waved, and there was more good feeling here than ever at the other conference with Press and magazine. It was apparent the television interview had added little to the store of Aquarius.
But by one detail it had. McGee, referring to a story in
Life
by Dora Jane Hamblin about Armstrong, spoke of a recurring dream the astronaut had had when a boy. In this dream, he was able to hover over the ground if he held his breath.
Aquarius always felt a sense of woe when he found himself subscribing to a new legend. Glut and the incapacity to absorb waste were the evils of the century—the pearls of one’s legends were not often founded on real grains of sand. The moment he read the story in
Life
, Aquarius had become infatuated with Armstrong’s recurrent dream. It was a beautiful dream—to hold one’s breath and to levitate; not to fly and not to fall, but to hover. It was beautiful because it might soon prove to be prophetic, beautiful because it was profound and it was mysterious, beautiful because it was appropriate to a man who would land on the moon. It was therefore a dream on which one might found a new theory of the dream, for any theory incapable of explaining this visitor of the night would have to be inadequate, unless it were ready to declare that levitation, breath, and the moon were not proper provinces of the dream.
Because it was, however, awesome, prophetic, profound, mysterious and appropriate, Aquarius hated to loose the vigors of his imagination onto the meaning of this dream unless he could believe it had actually happened. It was too perfect to his needs to accept it when he read it. But after studying Armstrong this day, listening to his near-humorous admission that yes, he had had thatdream when he was a boy, there was a quietness at the center of his reply which gave balm to the sore of Aquarius’ doubt. He knew he had now chosen to believe the dream had occurred.
And this conviction was not without the most direct kind of intellectual intoxication, for it dramatized how much at odds might be the extremes of Armstrong’s personality or for that matter the personality of astronauts. From their conscious mind to their unconscious depth, what a spectrum could be covered! Yes, Aquarius thought, astronauts have learned not only to live with opposites, but it was conceivable that the contradictions in their nature were so located in the very impetus of the age that their personality might begin to speak, for better or worse, of some new psychological constitution to man. For it was true—astronauts had come to live with adventures in space so vast one thought of the infinities of a dream, yet their time on the ground was conventional, practical, technical, hardworking, and in the center of the suburban middle class. If they engaged the deepest primitive taboos, they all but parodied the conventional in public manner; they embarked on odysseys whose success or
There was a hand from the TV crew when the cameras stopped. The trade unions once again were backing patriotic and muscular American effort. “Godspeed and good luck, Neil” one of them actually cried out into the wall of the glass, and Armstrong smiled and waved, and there was more good feeling here than ever at the other conference with Press and magazine. It was apparent the television interview had added little to the store of Aquarius.
But by one detail it had. McGee, referring to a story in
Life
by Dora Jane Hamblin about Armstrong, spoke of a recurring dream the astronaut had had when a boy. In this dream, he was able to hover over the ground if he held his breath.
Aquarius always felt a sense of woe when he found himself subscribing to a new legend. Glut and the incapacity to absorb waste were the evils of the century—the pearls of one’s legends were not often founded on real grains of sand. The moment he read the story in
Life
, Aquarius had become infatuated with Armstrong’s recurrent dream. It was a beautiful dream—to hold one’s breath and to levitate; not to fly and not to fall, but to hover. It was beautiful because it might soon prove to be prophetic, beautiful because it was profound and it was mysterious, beautiful because it was appropriate to a man who would land on the moon. It was therefore a dream on which one might found a new theory of the dream, for any theory incapable of explaining this visitor of the night would have to be inadequate, unless it were ready to declare that levitation, breath, and the moon were not proper provinces of the dream.
Because it was, however, awesome, prophetic, profound, mysterious and appropriate, Aquarius hated to loose the vigors of his imagination onto the meaning of this dream unless he could believe it had actually happened. It was too perfect to his needs to accept it when he read it. But after studying Armstrong this day, listening to his near-humorous admission that yes, he had had thatdream when he was a boy, there was a quietness at the center of his reply which gave balm to the sore of Aquarius’ doubt. He knew he had now chosen to believe the dream had occurred.
And this conviction was not without the most direct kind of intellectual intoxication, for it dramatized how much at odds might be the extremes of Armstrong’s personality or for that matter the personality of astronauts. From their conscious mind to their unconscious depth, what a spectrum could be covered! Yes, Aquarius thought, astronauts have learned not only to live with opposites, but it was conceivable that the contradictions in their nature were so located in the very impetus of the age that their personality might begin to speak, for better or worse, of some new psychological constitution to man. For it was true—astronauts had come to live with adventures in space so vast one thought of the infinities of a dream, yet their time on the ground was conventional, practical, technical, hardworking, and in the center of the suburban middle class. If they engaged the deepest primitive taboos, they all but parodied the conventional in public manner; they embarked on odysseys whose success or
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