Yes, the Moon was so strong that she pulled you up you realized this the moment you passed from one to the other: you had to swing up abruptly, with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwing your legs over your head, until your feet were on the Moon's surface. вЂ¦I would feel ladder and boat drifting away from below me, and the motion of the Moon would tear me from the Earth's attraction. There was always a flight of tiny creatures - little crabs, squid, and even some weeds, light and filmy, and coral plants - that broke from the sea and ended up on the Moon, hanging down from that lime-white ceiling, or else they stayed in midair, a phosphorescent swarm we had to drive off, waving banana leaves at themвЂ¦ вЂ¦On those nights the water was very calm, so silvery it looked like mercury, and the fish in it, violet-colored, unable to resist the Moon's attraction, rose to the surface, all of them, and so did the octopuses and the saffron medusas. My piece does not attempt to tell the story in any linear fashion, but rather takes a few striking images, excerpted below, as inspiration for the music.

What follows is a strange story about a group of people who would row a boat out to the point where the moon was closest, prop up a ladder, and then climb up onto the moon to collect the moonвЂ™s milk. The Distance of the Moon takes as its starting point the fact that the moon used to be closer to the Earth. Somehow, the very absurdity of each storyвЂ™s premise makes these underlying truths more vivid. Though each story begins from such a strange place, and though they are often very funny, they speak clearly to universal themes of loss, loneliness, and yearning. Each story in Cosmicomics takes as its starting point a scientific fact and then proceeds to spin out a whimsical tale with bizarre characters. This piece was inspired by the first story in Italo CalvinoвЂ™s collection Cosmicomics.

Italo calvino the distance of the moon