Their eyes the night before on the pale tracery of the Moon, rotund in a penumbral sky, as finely wrought as da Vinci sketch,  the waiting rocket pointing the way like a Norman tower, its ancient roots long-sunk in the tidal wash of a water meadow, trailing pale vapours as from the armoured carapace of a slumbering Quetzalcoatl, the same breath that would soon become an incandescent roar,  countdown done, engines on, prayers said, a vibration in the very marrow of their bones

“Artemis” : Greek goddess of the Moon; protector of young women; twin sister of Apollo.   Ray Bradbury called it “The Loneliness.” The way everything shrinks down when you leave the Earth, yourself most of all, body and soul. Watching the planet dwindle, that impossible oasis of light in a vast universe made up mostly of empty space. The surrounding dark matter like so much invisible pack ice pressing in. The globe contracting if not to a point then to something little larger

A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog The first Briton in space, Helen Sharman. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterly 1972 film adaptation of Stanislaw...