ITALO CALVINO THE DISTANCE OF THE MOON FULL

She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. My return was sweet, my home refound, but my thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the Moon, forever beyond my reach, as I sought her. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath prop a ladder against her and scramble up.

ITALO CALVINO THE DISTANCE OF THE MOON FULL

There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair's-breadth well, let's say a few yards anyway. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high nobody could hold them back. Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. But the whole business of the Moon's phases worked in a different way then: because the distances from the Sun were different, and the orbits, and the angle of something or other, I forget what as for eclipses, with Earth and Moon stuck together the way the were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, the the other. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full - nights as bright as day, but with a butter-colored light - it looked as if she were going to crush us when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind and when she was waxing, she came forward with her horns so low she seemed about to stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth's waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth.

Italo calvino the distance of the moon