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It was a lightbulb moment for me, too, because we can see that bathroom even though he has described nothing in it. Because it’s not just connections that we make automatically. Images themselves spring to life at the slightest provocation, so that sometimes I think a writer’s job is simply to create the gaps which the reader is hungry to fill.
Full Moon, Jonathan Cape, 2002. It’s one of my favourite books, a collection of photographs taken on the Apollo space missions and digitally restored by Michael Light. Incredible crispness, incredible detail. Dust on the chunky tyres of the moon rover, Walter Cunningham asleep in a wonky trapezium of sunlight in the command module, the tiny Polaroid Charles Duke had taken of his wife and children in their Houston backyard, which he left lying in the dust of the Descartes Highlands and which is probably still there, arcing over our heads a quarter of a million miles away.
The pictures are so clear, you think, ‘My God, it really happened.’ The pictures are so clear you think, ‘Maybe it didn’t, maybe this is a soundstage in Hollywood.’ Because it wasn’t like that, was it, in 1969, when I was sitting in the living room at three o’clock in the morning watching Neil Armstrong take that final bouncy step down? It was the gales and the static humming in the cable which made it real. Z-Cars, Playschool, the Arsenal/Liverpool cup final of ’71 … everything seen through a blizzard of zigzag snow which proved that these things were really happening over the hills and far away.
I’ve always loved wild places, mountains and rocky coasts especially. Loch Coruisk on Skye, the Ordesa Valley in the Pyrenees … That double frisson of fear and freedom, the way the scale of the place makes you so small, makes you vanish, almost. Partly it’s Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,’ and partly it’s the realisation that the world doesn’t give a damn for Wordsworth or you or me but will roll on regardless till we’re all soot and sand. Or perhaps they’re the same thing, the ‘sense sublime’ and our absolute unimportance in the great stretches of time and space.
This from Thoreau’s Walden:
We need the tonic of wildness … At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature … We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
The Apollo 11 capsule is in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington but the Apollo 10 capsule is in the Science Museum in London. It’s pure steampunk, all rivets and handles and battered panels, burnt and burnished like a brass bedpan on a pub wall, but it went round the moon and came back with John Young and Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan on board. This was earlier that same year, 1969. We didn’t get pocket calculators till 1971. I still can’t quite get my head round this fact, but it’s true and it’s real and it happened and the capsule is right there in front of you and if no one’s looking you can reach out and touch it and it has that same radiant presence that I’m always looking for in stuff. The Cucuteni horse, the bushing, the turquoise towel, the bump and crackle of a coal fire.
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