Chapter 9 — Of Ourselves and Our Origins

Standing here, you realize that the Moon isn’t romantic. It’s bare, matter-of-fact, unsentimental as a studio wall before the first mark. All the talk of exploration fades fast when you see what it really is: a place where everything extra has been stripped away. No atmosphere, no sound, no audience. You’re left with yourself, your tools, and a question as old as the first handprint on a cave wall: what am I doing here, making marks?

It comes back to that first impulse, the one that started art before anyone called it that. Some person in the dark smearing pigment on stone because they needed to see what they felt. That’s all it ever was, and maybe all it still is. Here, that impulse feels purified. The gadgets, the suits, the data — they’re just the new stone walls, the new pigments. The breath fogging up the visor becomes the sketch, the gesture, the reminder that the body still wants to translate being into image.

People always imagine the future as progress, but the Moon says otherwise. It’s a return. Every frontier turns into a mirror. The further we go, the clearer we see how little we’ve changed. We still need to make something that says: I was here. We still believe, maybe foolishly, that a line or a surface can hold a truth about ourselves.

Art on the Moon won’t be about invention; it’ll be about recognition. The recognition that our cleverness — all those centuries of math, paint, silicon, theory — circles back to one small, stubborn flame inside us. The urge to externalize feeling. The Moon is a perfect place for that because it doesn’t care. It’s too old, too silent to flatter us. It just reflects whatever we give it, like art does when it’s honest.

Looking at Earth from here, it’s hard not to laugh a little. All that noise and urgency compressed into a pale sphere. You realize art was never about explaining the world. It was about surviving the sight of it. Not survival in the crude sense, but in the metaphysical one — the need to bear the weight of awareness with grace.

Maybe that’s what the first artists in their caves felt: not the beginning of civilization but the relief of saying, I see this, and it sees me back. We’ve come a long way just to find a new cave, this time on a crater. Different dust, same gesture. The miracle isn’t that we reached the Moon. It’s that, once we did, we still wanted to draw.