“The moon is more like a sibling than a vassal,” Boyle writes, explaining that the moon formed from the same cloud of cosmic debris that created Earth. Its gravity not only stabilizes the climate by making the moon the main character of the seasons, but also makes the existence of life possible. The moon, which governs the tides, pulled primitive life into the nutrient-rich oceans of early Earth, then pushed them back to the shores where “fish out of water walked.”
But Boyle, whose graceful prose is as calming as a bedtime story, depicts the moon as more than just a driving force in physical phenomena. Humanity, she says, has always looked to our closest heavenly neighbor to understand our place beneath it. “Just as the moon reflects Earth’s light, the moon’s primary role in modern science is to tell us our stories,” she writes.
Ancient humans used the moon to harness time, which paved the way for organized systems like agriculture and religion (many forms of worshiping the moon as a god). When Galileo went to trial claiming that the Earth was not the center of the solar system (he discovered it, in part, by tracking the moon’s movements), the moon had already been separated from God. People began to think about what the moon is actually for and our own place in the universe. This idea, advocated by “Our Moon,” was the seed of philosophical thought and early scientific observation.
At times, the story strayed so far from the topic at hand that I found myself wondering, “What does this have to do with the moon?” But just as the moon always reappears in our skies, so too does Boyle return to his subject. There is always some kind of connection, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or mythical.
She takes us through the Age of Discovery, when going to the moon became an allegory for the colonization of new lands, and into the age of Apollo, when the moon was a symbol of political superiority. Boyle finds the moon in places I would never expect to see it. And she convinced me that even though our relationship with the moon is ever-changing, it remains a source of knowledge, wonder, and influence, never dull. .