wanderlust

Mars has two small moons whose names mean panic and terror. Phobos looks like a potato that experienced one terrible, and many average, concussions. Phobos hurtles around Mars every eight hours, which is three times faster than Mars rotates, which means Mars pulls it back and slows it down. Slowing down makes a moon lose height; in the end Phobos will smite its planet, or else get wrenched apart by gravity into a dusty ring of aftermath. Mars’s other moon Deimos is a slow and outer moon; an outer and outer moon; someday it will be a scrap moon, rattling around in the outer darkness, where drift superannuated spacecraft and exhausted starlets.

So fast moons slow down and slow moons speed up, and only during excerpts of time do planetary dalliances appear permanent. Our moon through many excerpts—the Moon—is a slow moon. Thus it is speeding up, thus it is falling up, coming off like a wheel, at one and a half inches per year. Let us now reflect upon the distancing Moon; for the Moon has long reflected upon us. To get an idea of the relationship between the Earth and the Moon and the Sun, find two friends and have the self-conscious one with lots of atmosphere be the Earth and the coercive one be the Sun. And you be the Moon, if you are periodically luminous and sometimes unobservable and your inner life has petered out.