The question has always been, what to do
with the moon, bewitching in its many
profiles, ever changing, beautiful. What do we
humans do with it? We find a bed, lie down,
and shut it off. That’s what we do with the pale
goddess of night, the pearl of the sky—
ignore it, obliterate it on a mattress. It had better
be a great mattress, a sublime mattress, one that
could have comatosed the Charge of the Light Brigade,
made Roman guards so drowsy they couldn’t find
the nails, thus changing 2000 years of history, or caused
Paul Tibbets to nod off, drop the bomb in the
Pacific instead of Hiroshima. It would have to be a mattress
that could substitute for the moon, but what could
possibly substitute for the moon? Nothing can substitute
for the moon. That’s why we dream. We dream
to distract ourselves from the fact that we sleep on
mattresses that can never substitute for the moon.
