Physicists say the moon, along with the rest of the universe, is continually drifting away from the Earth with time. It is, of course, marginal. There is no chance we will ever see it shrink, but it may be that when enough millennia have passed, provided people still exist, if we survive the perils imaginable or otherwise, it will start to seem smaller, almost a dot. But would the people then think we were liars? Does a child who has never seen the moon have any reason to believe in its existence? Would the poems seem farcical, and all the pictures seem manufactured?
We are limited to what we know, and when you are a child, knowledge is little; children are, then, bound to what they see, and then, that is what they know. All the people I meet who fail to be kind, and if kindness is an impossible order, to be civil, make me think of this recurring conclusion.
But the world is filled with excruciating detail, and you only see what you know. If you have ever only known pain, you may find it difficult to see hope, and if you have seen nothing but plenty, you will never understand the echoing lament of dearth. And this is where we come in, the people sitting and making art in one form or the other, who make the people their muse, who make the moon their star, who make paintings of solitary herons or sunsets over a city barely anyone in the world knows of, who spend a good lot of their days watching the world instead of participating in it, who when asked about their dreams and goals claim there are none for they are glad to be where they are, who write ballads to the knight in the night sky, who chronicle stories of hope otherwise lost to urban apathy, who change the narrative with the simple action of putting something down on a page.
The children in the far future will know of the moon. They may think of it as fiction, an idea perpetuated by those who came before, almost as if it were propaganda, but it will still stand for something. It will tell them that there is always a blot of light in a blanket of darkness, and if, for some reason, you cannot see it, you must will it into existence.