Renne Nunes

In the first days of April, the world seemed to hold its breath, watching four astronauts circle the Moon. It wasn’t the feat itself that held me, but the gesture. As if reaching it were not enough, it had to be circled, measured with the eyes, traced with the calm of someone inspecting a territory before assigning it a purpose. And then it occurred to me, with an unsettling clarity, that perhaps we no longer know how to look at anything without, at the same time, rehearsing its occupation.

The news spread with the familiar choreography of major events. Calibrated voices, pristine images, a carefully managed pedagogy of awe. We were expected to feel wonder, perhaps even a refined form of pride. And for a moment, something like that did pass through me. Not pride, but a strange stillness, the kind that suspends thought for a second, as if something very old within me had recognized it before I did. The Moon, I thought. Of all things, the Moon.

No one circles the Moon innocently. The gesture that presents itself as a triumph of human ingenuity almost always carries the less noble handwriting of power. To go there, to orbit it, measure it, rename it, study its thresholds, its shadows, its surfaces, all of it bears the fragrance of admiration, no doubt, but also the dry scent of appropriation. We contemplate, and then we catalogue. We are moved for a second, and in the next, we draft protocols of possession.

Perhaps this is our least acknowledged tragedy. It is not enough for us to love what shines. We want to administer it.

I thought then of how the Moon, for centuries, endured everything with a kind of mineral dignity. It had been a goddess, a clock, a mirror, an oracle, a metaphor of distance, an emblem of change, an accomplice to wolves and to the delirious. And now, in the impeccably technical vulgarity of our time, it was beginning to be treated as strategic extension, logistical corridor, a promise of sovereignty. We, who have barely learned to inhabit our own home without setting it ablaze, are already contemplating the occupation of another light.

And yet, something kept me from surrendering entirely to cynicism. Perhaps because beneath the thickness of state interests and national vanity, something remained bare, almost indecent in its simplicity: some humans crossed the vast darkness and looked back at Earth from afar. They saw our turbulence reduced to a suspended body, fragile, adrift in an excess of night. And there, for a few hours, they experienced what philosophers can only imagine and poets merely sense: the silent disproportion between our disputes and the abyss that surrounds them.

It was then that I remembered the words of an astronaut, not spoken at the height of launch, nor under the heroic glare of official images, but on the return, when spectacle had already yielded to the weight of the body. She said the journey had begun with someone knocking on her door and ended with a nurse asking for a hug. Between those two gestures, space; at the edges, the human. There was in that a delicacy almost unbearable. The cosmos, no matter how vast it opens, does not dissolve our need for touch, for a quiet voice in a corridor, for care before sleep. The infinite does not take that away. It only makes it more visible. And when she saw the Earth, it wasn’t the planet itself that struck her most, but the immensity surrounding it. And it was there, in that contrast, that something became inescapable: here on Earth, we are a crew.

I admit the phrase both moved me and unsettled me. It moved me because, faced with the abyss, there was something in it that rang true. It unsettled me because any phrase that feels too true risks hardening into a slogan and every slogan diminishes what it tries to say. We are a crew, yes. But what kind of crew competes over debris, draws borders over dust, turns even the stars into extensions of its own unrest? What kind of vessel is this, where some walk the deck while others keep rowing in the dark? And what kind of fraternity can endure when the same gaze that pauses at Earth’s fragility soon turns to chart the next advance?

Perhaps the most honest answer is the least comforting. We are a crew not because we are good, nor because we have learned fraternity, but because there is no alternative. We are bound to one another. Linked not by virtue, but by fate. Beautifully linked, the astronaut might say. I would add: tragically as well.

That night, I went to the window. The Moon was there, seemingly intact, as if still slipping, for a moment, from what already surrounds it. I thought of how many had loved it without ever possessing it, and how many now wish to possess it without even knowing how to love it. Perhaps we no longer know how to revere without drawing too close, how to contemplate without, little by little, turning it into something else. And so, almost without noticing, what once touched us from a distance gives way to something that no longer asks for silence, but for use.

And still, something remains out of step. The same impulse that drives us toward the sky seems, for an instant, to return us to the exact measure of our fragility. The hand that reaches out to mark territory is the same one that hesitates at the window. And the one who calculates routes and surfaces is also the one who, upon returning, is moved by something simple, almost forgotten, a request for a hug.

Perhaps that is what we are. A creature that profanes and is dazzled. That conquers and, in the midst of conquest, sometimes understands. That advances upon the world with imperial hands, yet still carries, deep within, an ancient capacity to tremble before light.

The Moon will remain there, above our haste, while we decide whether to turn it into a colony or a question. As for us, what remains to be seen is whether we will ever become worthy of what we contemplate or whether we will go on circling beauty until we empty it of meaning.