Read Online Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online Page A

failure was so far from being entirely in their own control that they must be therefore fatalistic, yet the effort was enterprising beyond the limits of the imagination. They were patriots, but they were moonmen. They lived with absolute lack of privacy, their obvious pleasure was to be alone in the sky. They were sufficiently selfless to be prepared to die for their mission, their team, their corporate NASA, their nation; yet they were willy-nilly narcissistic as movie stars. “Sugar, I tried and couldn’t make doo-doo,” says Lulu Meyers in
The Deer Park
. The heart pressure, the brain waves, the bowel movements of astronauts were of national interest. They were virile men, but they were prodded, probed, tapped into, poked, flexed, tested, subjected to a pharmacology of stimulants, depressants, diuretics, laxatives, retentives, tranquilizers, motion sickness pills, antibiotics, vitamins and food which was designed to control the character of their feces. They were virile, but they were done to, they were done to like no healthy man alive. So again their activitywas hazardous, far-flung, bold, demanding of considerable physical strength, yet the work and physical condition called for the ability to live in cramped conditions with passive bodies, the patience to remain mentally alert and physically inactive for days. They lived, it was evident, with no ordinary opposites in their mind and brain. On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality (which is to say that world where every question must have answers and procedures, or technique cannot itself progress) yet to inhabit—if only in one’s dreams—that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself. The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars. It was the most soul-destroying and apocalyptic of centuries. So in their turn the astronauts had personalities of unequaled banality and apocalyptic dignity. So they suggested in their contradictions the power of the century to live with its own incredible contradictions and yet release some of the untold energies of the earth. A century devoted to the rationality of technique was also a century so irrational as to open in every mind the real possibility of global destruction. It was the first century in history which presented to sane and sober minds the fair chance that the century might not reach the end of its span. It was a world half convinced of the future death of our species yet half aroused by the apocalyptic notion that an exceptional future still lay before us. So it was a century which moved with the most magnificent display of power into directions it could not comprehend. The itch was to accelerate—the metaphysical direction unknown.
    Aquarius, aware of the profundity of his natural bent for error,aware of the ineradicably romantic inclination of his mind to believe all those tales and legends he desired to believe, nonetheless came to a conclusion on this hot Saturday evening, July 5, on the southeastern rim of Houston, that Armstrong when a boy had indeed had a recurring dream in which he would hold his breath and rise from the ground and hover, and on this dream Aquarius, who had been reconnoitering for months through many a new thought (new at the very least to him) on the architecture and function and presence of the dream, would build his theory, on Armstrong’s dream would Aquarius commit himself. Any notes toward a new psychology