Moon logic

A reflection on friendship, war and the cosmos, from a walk under a March moon...

The sky is mauve and milky blue. The moon is up, bright white, floating over the spiny black winter trees like an escaped child’s balloon. I am walking home from the library. I’ve had my earphones in all afternoon to avoid the irritations – people mumbling to themselves, babbling on phones. Is there no etiquette in libraries anymore? I huff. I had a deadline. I sealed myself inside my own head. Yet somewhere, at the edge of consciousness, I knew, bombs were dropping.

Now the world shakes me awake with its beauty. Look, it says. Here I am. And I’m bewitched. My phone rings. A friend in Paris, walking too, under the same moon. He wants to talk, he says, about the war.

But the moon, I say. I know, he says. It hangs over both of us, and I feel its pull as if there is a tide in me, an unnameable longing. He is more muted under this extraordinary light. But the war, he says, the bombs.

I tell my friend I’ve always loved 1930s novels. There’s something heartbreaking about them, a particular ache. The writers did not know what was coming, not really, but the best of them felt it: a bitterness in the cold wind blowing through their champagne parties and love affairs, while the century gathered itself into a fist. We read them now and feel the double exposure – what they saw, what we know.

My friend is passing Saint-Eustache. I hear a woman singing that old song, At last my love has come along. Paris at its seductive best. Then out of nowhere, a siren’s wail. My friend curses – the pompiers are blocking his path. He has to backtrack, take another road.

Is this how it ends, one day? No warning, no time to prepare – mid-conversation, under a luminous sky. How beautiful it all was. How pulled I was, toward all of it.

Does the moon care about the war? Does it care about us? It says nothing. And still we look up

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