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abandoned and forgotten.” The writer Ray Bradbury told an Italian reporter,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Homer will die. Michelangelo will die. Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein will die, all those will die who now are notdead because we are alive, we are thinking of them, we are carrying them within us. And then every single thing, every memory, will hurtle down into the void with us. So let us save them, let us save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not be long of this Earth.
    The most chilling word here is Bradbury’s tiny preposition: “not long of this Earth.” Bradbury could have said, “not long on this Earth,” implying that departure would be a movement from this place to another. If we are “not long of this Earth,” however, our identity is fully independent of it. Ray Bradbury is a careful writer. He knows what he says: the Earth is our campsite only.
    And Pope Pius XII told Wernher von Braun (who helped Hitler, and later the United States, to develop rocket technology), “The Lord . . . had no intention of setting a limit to inquiry when He said Ye shall have dominion over the earth. It is all creation which He has entrusted to man and which He has given to the human mind, to penetrate it.” According to these views, certain human problems will not be solved on Earth, and the Earth may become the victim of our inability to solve them.
    In Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon , a character announces that “Humanly speaking, every possible precaution has been taken to bring this rash experiment to a successful termination.” Later in the novel, we learn that the scientists did think of everything— except how the projectile with three men inside might return to Earth.
    â€œIt is all very well to go to the moon, but how to get back again?” says one of the three as they hurtle outward into space.
    â€œThe question has no real interest,” replies Barbicane, president of the Gun Club which has sponsored the mission. “Later, when we think it advisable to return, we will take counsel together.”
    So stories go. So our lives go, unless we take counsel together.
    We need to take counsel with Cicero before his head is nailed to the rostrum, with Jules and Buzz and Raphael. We must take counsel in many languages. We must speak sternly to our heroes, and listen to our children.
    The splashdown of American astronauts far out at sea, their welcoming by a President, a commander, a team of doctors and soldiers to guard their quarantine—all the modern version of Barbicane’s Gun Club—is shockingly different from Titov’s return. Titov landed on the ground, at the heart of Asia. No one knew where he would come down, and every citizen was out to find him. When Titov’s parachute bumped his capsule back to earth and he opened the hatch, a woman ecstatic with blood on her face leaped from her car to kiss him. Driving, she had seen his little ship descending. She had driven into the ditch by the road in her haste to touch him. She ran toward his ship. He lived on Earth again, and she welcomed him.
    Three days after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I made it to Denmark. It was good to stop in one place a few days; it was a relief not to hitchhike, not to climb into anyone’s machine and live at the mercy of their speed. Near the town of Århus, I met a girl named Helle. From her parents’ house we took bicycles along the path that wove past flashing streams, dark woods, through meadows thick with sunlight. The grasshoppers still had something to sing about, after so many generations. We were young, foolish, happy. As I drifted ahead around a long curve above the water, she called out, “Wherever heaven is, it must be like this.”
    I turn to look.

A F EW M ILES S HORT OF W ISDOM

    A few nights in your life, you know this like the