The Moon: That One Small Step Is Still Hard to Measure
At the end of the first chapter of John Updike’s “Rabbit Redux,” the title character, a fictional Pennsylvania everyman whose given name is Harry Angstrom, tunes in, like millions of his nonfictional fellow citizens, to watch the Moon landing on television.
Even though the Apollo 11 mission casts a long metaphorical shadow over the book, the second in what would ultimately become a quartet of novels about Rabbit, Rabbit’s experience of the epochal event of July 20, 1969, is curiously equivocal and detached.
It’s not clear what’s going on. On his parents’ television, he sees that “a man in clumsy silhouette has interposed himself among these abstract shadows and glare. An Armstrong, but not Jack. He says something about ‘steps’ that a crackle keeps Rabbit from understanding.
“Electronic letters travelling sideways spell out MAN IS ON THE MOON.”
But the true significance of those words escapes poor Rabbit. “I don’t know,” he says to his ailing mother. “I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything yet.”
What was he meant to feel? Was this a small step or a giant step, and in what direction? Perhaps because of the Moon landing’s hybrid nature — it was at once a science project and a media spectacle, an expression of apolitical idealism and an act of national self-assertion, a fact and a symbol — this happening was both dramatic and a bit puzzling, even opaque....
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Even though the Apollo 11 mission casts a long metaphorical shadow over the book, the second in what would ultimately become a quartet of novels about Rabbit, Rabbit’s experience of the epochal event of July 20, 1969, is curiously equivocal and detached.
It’s not clear what’s going on. On his parents’ television, he sees that “a man in clumsy silhouette has interposed himself among these abstract shadows and glare. An Armstrong, but not Jack. He says something about ‘steps’ that a crackle keeps Rabbit from understanding.
“Electronic letters travelling sideways spell out MAN IS ON THE MOON.”
But the true significance of those words escapes poor Rabbit. “I don’t know,” he says to his ailing mother. “I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything yet.”
What was he meant to feel? Was this a small step or a giant step, and in what direction? Perhaps because of the Moon landing’s hybrid nature — it was at once a science project and a media spectacle, an expression of apolitical idealism and an act of national self-assertion, a fact and a symbol — this happening was both dramatic and a bit puzzling, even opaque....