The moon in a suburban sky. A gigantic sphere of rock, pockmarked with craters and shining with the reflected light of a star, hangs over a commonplace scene of semis and front gardens and parked cars that you could find in any town in England.
I’ve always seen those kinds of scenes as a reminder that the ordinary and the everyday are not the whole story, and are surrounded everywhere and all the time by the strange and the unfamiliar. (In fact I used the moon in just such a way in a story called ‘Spring Tide‘).
The strange part is, though, that the suburban street is something much rarer and more remarkable than the moon. There are many cratered spheres of rock in the solar system alone -look at Ceres, for instance, or Pluto – but, as far as we know, no dwellings of any kind at all anywhere else but Earth, let alone something resembling a suburban house or a car.
* * *
Recently my wife and I were returning from an outing with two of our grandchildren, one aged 3, one nearly 2, in the back of the car. We pulled up outside a supermarket with the idea that my wife would nip in to buy a couple of things we needed, while I waited in the the car with the children. But the children wouldn’t have that. They wanted to go in too.
I watched the two of them as we passed through the door. I mean, what exactly is exciting about a supermarket? But they stood there for a second or two with expressions that said ‘WOW!’, and then they were off down the aisles, finding things, looking at things, apparently competely delighted.
I suppose it’s necessary, from an evolutionary point of view, that everyday things should stop seeming amazing, because otherwise we’d all constantly be distracted from necassary tasks by the desire just to stand and gape. And that’s why what once seemed wonderful soon becomes merely ordinary. But I like to remind myself from time to time that the mysterious, the numinous, are not really other, not remote unreachable places like the moon, but anything at all that we manage to see, by whatever means, without the dulling effect that comes with familiarity.
This, I suppose, is what my character Jeff is doing in Dark Eden when from time to time he says to himself, ‘We are here. We really are here.’
