perhaps, this is one of the soberest passages in Chaucer, and some readers have doubted that the author of the Canterbury Tales actually wrote it. In a sense, he did not. He only borrowed it from Macrobius, who borrowed it from Cicero, who borrowed it from Lucretius, who borrowed it from Plato, who got it from the Muse. Actually, Chaucer’s Troilus is himself quite jolly at this point: “within himself he laughed at the sorrow / Of those who wept so sincerely for his death.” Their concerns are so distant, so tiny, blind, absurd. Troilus is jolly at the expense of those he left behind—the wretched Earth and its citizens.
With Milton in the seventeenth century, the traditional language of Cicero’s cosmic vision remained, but the attitude toward the value of the Earth began to change. Where Chaucer’s Troilus despised “this litel spot of erthe,” in Paradise Lost the angel Raphael tells Adam,
. . . this earth a spot, a grain,
An atom, with the firmament compared . . .
Though, in comparison of Heav’n, so small,
Nor glistering, may of solid good contain
More plenty than the sun that barren shines
Whose virtue on itself works no effect
But in the fruitful Earth.
Maybe it was Milton’s blindness that brought this change of heart. Maybe it was the chill distances of space that Galileo’s telescope and Kepler’s mathematics had begun to actualize. Something made Milton and his contemporaries begin to imagine that from out in space the Earth would be small, yes, very small—but somehow winsome, fertile, a garden for a good life. The Earth had been small for Cicero, but therefore worthless. For Milton’s Raphael, the tiny atom of Earth holds Eden, and is a kind of heaven in small. From Milton and those who followed him, we inherit both the vision of Earth’s smallness and a sense of empathy with it. A hundred years after Milton, cosmic travelers in Voltaire’s Micromegas first sight the Earth from space: “they discerned a small speck, which was the Earth. Coming from Jupiter, they could not but be moved with compassion at the sight of this miserable spot, upon which, however, they resolved to land.”
Cosmic travel literature continued from the seventeenth century with an increasing interest in the technology thought to be required for such journeys. Johannes Kepler, best known for his discovery of the elliptical paths and other mathematical principles of planetary motion, wrote a Ciceronean Dream in which an Icelandic “dæmon” directs human passengers to the moon. Each must be drugged, protected from cold, assisted with breathing, and bunched like a frightened spider (or human embryo) to survive the trip. (This scientific allegory back-fired when it was used as evidence to condemn Kepler’s mother as a witch; she was thrown into prison in chains.) Cyrano de Bergerac, on the other hand, imagined a series of flasks filled with dew and strapped onto the traveler’s chest; when the sun warms the dew, it evaporates and rises, lifting the traveler away in this bright harness. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver describes the spindled magnet that lifts and guides the airborne island of Laputa, while Jules Verne’s first moon-travelers climb inside a gigantic bullet, to be fired from a cannon sunk five hundred feet into the ground near Tampa, Florida. Somehow, all these travelers survive.
Despite technology, Scipio’s dream-journey into space still seems to hover in the background for twentieth-century science fiction. For the character named Bedford in The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells, take-off is less technological than psychological: “I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.” Similarly, the religious themes of Dante, Chaucer, and Milton reappear in more recent science fiction works like those co-authored by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (a NASA scientist turned writer): The Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer. Even modern literature set on Earth may take a cosmic view:
Wait! One more look. Good-by, good-by world. Good-by Grover’s Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
For contemporary audiences of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, our town is the Earth itself; but this Earth is no longer the shameful speck of Cicero’s vision. It is home.
“Colors startled me . . . an extraordinary array of vivid hues that were strangely gentle in their play across the receding surface of the world.” Gherman Stepanovich Titov so remembers his view of the Earth as he circled it seventeen times in 1961. The early missions went so fast, and were so filled with strict concentration on the flight controls, that the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had little time for sustained meditation on the Earth below them—John Glenn seeking out the buttons with the tiny red lights taped to his fingertips, and Yuri Gagarin glancing only at the Earth’s “very characteristic and very beautiful blue halo.”
When the Apollo program began in 1967, astronauts got far enough from Earth and had enough time in space to really stand in Scipio’s shoes. On March 5, 1969, Russell “Rusty” Schweickart climbed out of the Apollo 9 spacecraft over 100,000 miles from Earth. He was wearing a two-million dollar suit designed—by skill and hope—to protect him from the dangers of space. Unlike the Gemini astronauts, Schweickart had no umbilical oxygen tube leading back to the mother ship, only a simple tether. For this EVA (extra-vehicular activity), he was really outside and alone. As he stood in what they called the “golden slippers”—foot pads painted with pure gold to protect them from the searing rays of the sun—and as he gazed down long and carefully at Earth, he first told his companions inside Apollo, “That’s what you call a view from the top of the stairs.”
He was Scipio, he was Troilus, he was the angel Raphael. But what Troilus despised as “this litel spot of erthe,” Schweickart saw in an utterly different way. “There are no frames and no boundaries,” he said later of the Earth. “That little spot you could cover with your thumb—it’s everything.”
Behind him had been the light-year distant stars, the silent fire of the sun, the moon whirling on its path; yet the soft blue spot of Earth he turned to was everything.
There was a similar moment as the Apollo 11 lunar entry module started its final descent toward the moon. As the altitude of the module began to drop and Neil Armstrong’s heartbeat began to rise—from a normal 77 to a high of 156 at touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility—and as the last flurry of technical decisions had to be carried out, as the radio system began, for some reason, to fade at this moment, Buzz Aldrin fired off a sentence to Mission Control that had nothing to do with the potential emergency at hand: “Got the Earth right out our front window.”
It was Aldrin who later spent a part of the precious hours on the moon taking bread, wine, and a Bible from his personal preference kit, and celebrating communion. But his sentence in the midst of descent was less religious than it was a simple recognition. There was the Earth. So that’s it? Like the copy of Pushkin’s poetry that Titov smuggled into his two week stint in the space-simulation “Deaf Room,” a habitual idea like home can be tucked away in the survival kit of the mind. A long journey can produce a simple discovery. For James Lovell, commander of the aborted Apollo 13 (which was partially disabled by an explosion on the outward journey, then circled the moon and somehow made it home), it came to this: “We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.”
If space-travel helps us to see what we have on Earth by seeing what the cold void lacks, then the astronauts follow Cicero in telling us something crucial about life on Earth. But their message has been read in very different ways. On one side are the advocates of what a third-grader, in a spectacular spelling discovery, once called “the plant earth.” Here we have Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth”; the cover image and philosophy
