The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Moon: A Peek-Through Picture-Book About the Most Beloved Fixture of the Night Sky

Moon: A Peek-Through Picture-Book About the Most Beloved Fixture of the Night Sky

Night after night at my telescope, I marvel with undiminished awe at what Margaret Fuller reverenced as “that best fact, the Moon.” How is it that our abiding nocturnal companion, which has stood sentinel and silent witness to the rise and fall of civilizations, to innumerable heartbreaks and triumphs, never loses its luminous mesmerism? It has inspired sonnets and love songs and religious reveries — an enchanted loom onto which humanity has woven entire mythologies and cosmogonies. Nothing else quite beckons us to transcend the smallness of our lives, zoom out of our fleeting sorrows, and take solace in the telescopic perspective more powerfully than the Moon. “There is a soft moonlight that can give us the peace that passes understanding,” Aldous Huxley wrote in his meditation on the Moon, considering its myriad enchantments. “There is a moonlight that inspires a kind of awe. There is a cold and austere moonlight that tells the soul of its loneliness and desperate isolation, its insignificance or its uncleanness. There is an amorous moonlight prompting to love — to love not only for an individual but sometimes even for the whole universe.”

That timeless bond between our home planet and its satellite, between moonlight and the human heart, comes alive with uncommon loveliness in Moon: A Peek-Through Picture Book (public library) by German artist and author Britta Teckentrup.

A singsong narrative carries the reader across gentle rhymes and gorgeously illustrated vignettes, depicting the Moon’s role in the lives of various creatures. As its phases swell from crescent to full, we see it illuminate the nocturnal foraging of the field mouse, congregate the puffins under the northern lights, govern the tides of the mighty ocean, steer the sea turtles to lay their eggs, and stand vigil over our homes as we dream our human dreams.

As birds fly south to warmer climes,
They seem to sense the perfect time.
Shining strongly through the night,
The moon will always guide their flight.

What emerges is a tender serenade to this most beloved fixture of the night sky, both springboard for the human imagination and anchor to the deepest cosmic realities, uniting lives of tremendous difference under its soft, generous glow.

The ocean sparkles, bluey-green,
Lit up by a magical scene.
Waves roll gently to and fro.
The moon commands their ebb and flow.

Couple Teckentrup’s lovely Moon with her 17th-century compatriot Maria Clara Eimmart’s stunning astronomical drawings of the moon phases, then revisit Sun and Moon — a picture-book about celestial myths from Indian folklore, illustrated by ten of India’s greatest indigenous artists.


Published May 13, 2019

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/05/13/britta-teckentrup-moon/

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