For three days now, Artemis II has been on its flight around the Moon, signaling the return of crewed missions to that enchanting orbit, fifty years after the first astonishment. Half a century on, humanity is still circling restlessly among the planets, searching for a drop of water on Mars or a trace of life on Saturn, only to discover that it can kill 100,000 people in Gaza and a thousand Lebanese in southern Lebanon in a single night. And if the problem is Benjamin Netanyahu, is it even conceivable that he could also be the solution?
By one of those fateful coincidences, on the very day man took his first step on the surface of the Moon, I took my first step into married life, and that proved far more complex and far more difficult. It became clear to me that the journey to the Moon is a spring outing compared with the journey of life, whether for individuals or for societies. The question is the same whether you are Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri in Maarrat al-Numan or a NASA scientist in Florida.
Many paid little attention to this mixed lunar mission; conditions on Earth were deteriorating at an alarming pace. While Artemis II glides along its lunar path like a swan, a Phantom jet, long famed for hunting airborne ghosts, falls over Iran.
Human beings do not change their habits. Give them an enchanting moon and they turn it into a song, or a tethered prize. Give them a horse-drawn carriage and they turn it into a spacecraft. Give them America and they will want Canada, Panama, and Greenland along with it.
The United States has advanced so far in science that space now seems crowded with planets like festival balloons. Yet suddenly the crack of gunfire and rockets rises, and the skies and the earth fill with drones of every kind.
It is as if Artemis II were a private gift for the occasion. What does it mean to me, as an individual marking a wedding anniversary, compared with what I have lived through as a defenseless individual among millions? Sun or moon, what difference does it make? Did not Al-Akhtal al-Saghir once say: The day I wake with neither sun nor moon, who is left to make music on a lute stripped of its strings?
