“By standing on the ridge of the roof of the house, you probably could
poke it with the bamboo.”
--Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful
statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.
This set me thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that
brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and
fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some
inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to
freedom. I thought of the countless generations of children who have
asked for the Moon, and of the generations of parents who have laughed
at the asking. And then I entered into the following meditation:--
* * * * *
Have we any right to laugh at the child’s wish for the Moon? No wish
could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children
of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings
that if realized could only work us woe,--such as desire for the
continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality,
which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often
subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?
Now foolish as may seem, to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the
child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us
to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun
and the Morning-Star and all the Host of Heaven.