The Manley arts: Lost Moon.(Book Review)

A literary game I like to play is trying to figure out what books written during my lifetime will be enjoyed by future generations of readers. Looking into "the seeds of time to see which grain will grow and which will not" can be, as Macbeth certainly discovered, a perilous exercise. To predict the future, it helps to examine the present. What old books do people still read today? Aside from high-school and college students, people aren't reading very many. Do you know anyone who goes home on the weekends and relieves stress by reading Homer, Plato, or Aristotle? Do you know anyone who enjoys dipping into the delights of Newton, Gibbon, or Cervantes? How about Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne? When I first broke into librarianship 33 years ago, there were people who drew satisfaction from working through the classics. Those people are mostly dead. Today the Great Books groups of old have given way to Oprah's Book-of-the-Month Club.

More sobering is the reality that even in academia, the classics are dying. The Western Canon, that once revered collection of iconic books from Homer to Tennyson, is now in ill repute. Those works, which had always been considered the foundation for rational civilization, are now rejected as racist, sexist, and imperialist. Ours is an age that embraces the new and innovative. It's not that we don't respect the past; we simply don't see its relevance in a world that is in a constant state of scientific and technological upheaval. In trying to predict which contemporary literary achievements will have enduring interest to future generations, it's necessary to identify what aspects of our modern history will be of future interest. My guess is that there is only one the Apollo Space Program. Those of us who came to maturity in the second half of the twentieth century have lived through wars, assassinations, and a civil rights revolution, but as future generations look back at us, they will be mostly intrigued by our moon missions.

The manned moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s represent an extreme historical anomaly. They were 100 or even 200 years ahead of their time. They occurred not as a result of the evolution of an incremental space program that graduated slowly from orbiting space stations to unmanned probes to interplanetary manned exploration, but as a result of a sudden and completely unexpected political crisis--the launching of a beeping little metal ball called Sputnik I by the Russians. We were more shook up by the orbiting Sputnik than we were by the news that the Russians had developed their own atomic bomb. As a result, our politicians threw fiscal caution to the wind and poured hundreds of billions of dollars into a risky, hurry-up venture called NASA in order to establish instant space superiority.

Now that the cold war has been won, space exploration has taken its seat in the back of the congressional budget bus. Scientific discovery is not nearly as compelling to our politicians as military superiority. My guess is that with tight budgets and shaky economies, no president will have the will to go back to the moon for many years, perhaps a century or two. In that sense, it will be truly weird for high-tech citizens of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries to look up at the moon and ...