Under the Stars: A Journey into Light - Softcover

1 Bathed in Moonlight

I stand on the beach with my back to the sea, listening to the flat, rattling intake of breath as the water sucks away shingle. The sun is two-thirds hidden but still not quite set. It forms a thick, burning wedge still clearly visible above the soft, sandy bluff. It is a halo of light below the blush of the lower sky, a giant, bloodred flower that blossoms on the inside of my eyelids every time I blink.
      The sky itself looks as though it is splitting, like an oil stored too long. The heavy sediments of the dark settle, while overhead the colours shift and merge like newly applied watercolours running into each other – reds and pinks, yellows and white. Only in the highest reaches of the atmosphere, where the sun’s rays still shine from beyond the earth’s curve, does the sky remain a brittle, icy blue. I watch as a plane flies almost directly up, its vapour trail a thread of gold that sews the colours together; jetting from the new darkness to the old light of day.
      I check my watch and turn around. It’s nearly time.
      I’ve always loved coming here to the coast of Covehithe, both for its quiet and for its unerring strangeness. Nestled between the genteel promenades of Southwold to the south and the fallen splendour of Lowestoft to the north, it is a place where the mild flatness of East Anglia slowly unravels into the sea; one of the first places in the country to see the sun and one of the first to lose it. At certain times of the month, the same is true of the moon. It’s why I have come here this evening, to experience our most familiar light at night. A glowing changeling, whose light has directed travellers and bewitched all living things – man and moth alike.
      I’ve been wondering if the moon still has that power. In a world of artificial lighting and technology most of us no longer need it for navigation. The generations-old understanding of its cycle, how the waxing and waning light signified both the passing of days and the changing of seasons, is being forgotten. The moon is melting into the background, into insignificance.
      The sea continues to suck and lick. A tern calls, sharp and bidding. Over the horizon of the North Sea comes the moon. First a glow. Then a pale, pinkish cuticle that swells into a weakling light. It continues to rise, an ever-expanding, ever-brightening island until after only a couple of minutes she tears away from the membrane of water, dripping light onto the earth, shining back at the sunken sun. The birth of the full moon.
      She hangs, impossible, a great, cratered kite. Her own seas, the large basaltic plains formed by volcanic activity but once mistaken for water, are all visible, dark against the light-coloured highlands. There, the eyes of the Sea of Showers and the Sea of Serenity, there, the nose of Seething Bay and there, the openmouthed surprise of the Sea of Clouds and the Sea of Knowledge. The whole face of the moon is pinched pink, a result of particles in the atmosphere scattering the light, but it looks as if she is blushing with the effort of her steep climb. She is, as D. H. Lawrence said, ‘Flushed, grand and naked, as from the chamber’.
      I can’t help but be struck by the size of her. Looming and luminous. Although an average distance of 384,400 km away, she seems much, much closer – as if she could be hit and toppled with a well aimed stone. It is a trick of the eye, an illusion that makes the moon seem larger as it sits just above the horizon, the cause of which is still debated.
      It is, I realise, the first time I have ever seen the moon rise, have watched her gather her silvery skirts and jump. Perhaps her ascent has always been masked by houses, by hills and trees. But also, I suspect I haven’t really looked. The moon, as large as it is, seems impossible to ignore, yet I have done just that. My experiences have been limited: a brief glance at a bony crescent while putting out the bins; a glimpse of a first quarter lurking in the car’s rear-view mirror. Sometimes there have been daytime sightings too, pigeon-egg pale. A fragile, dark-eyed stop-out.