#2 Issue: The Moon and The Sea

Hello and welcome to the second issue of A Story for the Week!

The story of the week is The Distance of the Moon by Italian writer and journalist, Italo Calvino. The Distance of the Moon is featured in the Cosmicomics short story collection which was first published in 1965.

The Distance of the Moon is just one of those stories that will hook you, charm you, entrance you from the very beginning, and it is, unsurprisingly, the most popular short story from Cosmicomics. It is set in a distant time, a time so bizarre yet familiar—a time when the world was just beginning, when the world was still so untouched and innocent, when the time was still young, and when the Moon was so close to Earth it was almost sitting atop it.

Our heroes, as lovely and innocent as they were, would, of course, climb up to the Moon. But the Moon was and still is a force of nature, wild and uncontrollable, and it would continue moving, waxing and waning without any regard if Q fwfq and others have to get back home. And one day, when they were busy collecting Moon-milk, the Moon nonchalantly went away, with Q fwfq and others stuck.

In The Distance of the Moon, at least in my opinion, Calvino was never concerned with writing an underlying, what-the-author-meant message that would take you hours to decipher and it would have a deep impact on your beliefs and perception of the world. No, Calvino simply let his mind wander and toyed with the “what if” idea to create a stunningly beautiful story that would resonate with you simply because of its beauty. Not all stories have to have this grand narrative or a lesson, sometimes life is just beautiful or sad.

The story is written beautifully—not only because the sentence structure and word choices will leave you breathless at times, but also because it follows the traditional story formula (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution). The Distance of the Moon already hinges on the verge of absurdity with ideas like climbing up the Moon and floating between it and the sea, and adding more complexity with non-traditional storytelling would just unnecessarily clutter the story.

Calvino likes long sentences sprinkled with fancy words, but this isn’t over the top. In fact, it leaves an impression as if you’re sitting by the fire and he himself is telling you the story.

In a nutshell, The Distance of the Moon is a quite traditional story in terms of structure, language, and word choice, but it stands out in the bunch with how Calvino takes silly daydreaming concepts and turns them into fully fleshed-out themes in the story (like climbing the Moon). It’s like your daydreaming is coming to life.

I also recommend you check out this animation of The Distance of the Moon, but not before you read it. 🙂 

I’ll wrap this up with a couple of quotes from The Distance of the Moon which, in my opinion, encapsulate the essence of the story:

“Above me the enormous lunar disc no longer seemed the same as before: it had become much smaller, it kept contracting, as if my gaze were driving it away, and the emptied sky gaped like an abyss where, at the bottom, the stars began multiplying, and the night poured a rive of emptiness over me, frowned me in dizziness and alarm.”

“(…) we raised our eyes up, up to the world where we had been born, finally traversed in all its various expanse, explored landscapes no Earth-being had ever seen, or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.”

“(…) I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”

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