F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. He didn’t know it, and he couldn’t have guessed it, and it wasn’t his fault; but he was wrong. On the final page of “The Great Gatsby,” he thought—or allowed Nick Carraway to think—of Dutch sailors sighting America, “a fresh, green breast of a new world.” To set foot upon that greenness was not an invasion, but a gasp: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder.” When those words were published, in 1926, it was unfathomable that they might demand revision; but because of what happened forty-three years later, and because of one American who died on Saturday, we need quietly to amend Fitzgerald’s text, and add a single word. Instead of “the last time in history,” make it the second last.
Not that Neil Armstrong had much time for wondering, on July 20, 1969. Especially not around quarter past three, by the Houston clock. He was too busy looking for a parking space. This is never easy, with rush hour coming on, and Eagle—Armstrong’s vehicle of choice, a flimsy little bug of a thing, with Buzz Aldrin in the passenger seat—was still cruising along at quite a lick. Also, for most of the ride, he was upside-down. He flipped over, descended, slowed to forty-eight miles per hour, and went looking for a free bay. There were no other cars, but plenty of rocks the size of cars, which seemed unlikely to pull out and let him in. They had been parked there for a few billion years, and nobody had given them a ticket. So Armstrong switched to “attitude hold” and carried on looking.
In the end, he found his spot on the moon, and his place in history, though both were won with an almost frightening lack of hoopla. If, on landing, he was flustered by the presence, in Eagle’s gas tank, of no more than twenty seconds’ worth of remaining fuel, he didn’t show it.
All the tributes paid Saturday, after his death at the age of eighty-two, took care to stress his modesty, and he certainly belongs to that chastening group of beings whose capacity for heroic action is outstripped only by their reluctance to make a big deal out of it, let alone a profit. But it would entirely wrong to cast him, on the grounds of his natural diffidence, as a hermit; he retreated to no grotto, but became a teacher—still the best way to find, and use, your public voice without being forced to raise it. Nothing is more typical of Armstrong, or more estimable, than his decision not to go into politics; heaven knows what the blandishments, or the invitations, must have been. That is not to deprecate the service rendered by, say, John Glenn, but simply to remind ourselves that political ambition, like our other passions, is in the end a low sublunary affair; and that Armstrong, by dint of being the first man to tread not upon terra firma but upon the gray dust of terra incognita, rose above the fray and stayed there.
There is a great photograph, taken by Mario De Biasi for the Italian magazine EPOCA on July 16, 1969, not long before final preparations for liftoff. The watch on Armstrong’s left wrist reads half past one. We see him and Aldrin, alone, having something to eat in the NASA cafeteria; or, rather, Aldrin has cleared his plate, and is sitting there with hands folded. Armstrong still has food on his fork; it looks like chicken, and, before anything else, one is impressed that these guys could actually consume and digest food at such a moment. Most of us, faced with a job interview, a worrying doctor’s appointment, or even a lengthy flight, have trouble forcing down coffee and a cookie; Armstrong was about to travel nearly a quarter of a million miles, with no inflight movie, let alone miniatures of scotch, and drop onto what children used to believe was a sphere of green cheese. Here he was, though, finishing his chicken: proof, if any were needed, that whatever the two men took to the moon, it wasn’t a bellyful of butterflies. And yet neither man is looking at the other. Each gazes slightly to one side, into space.
Armstrong was not a mystery. He was a nerveless pilot, “probably the coolest under pressure of anyone I ever had the privilege of working with,” in the words of Charlie Duke, his fellow-astronaut and the capsule communicator on Apollo 11. Everyone who worships Apollo, or anyone who has seen the fine 2007 documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon,” will know the footage of the lunar landing training vehicle—the “flying bedstead,” as it was known to its intrepid users—that veered and crashed, in May, 1968, with Armstrong at the controls. He bailed out with a second and a half to spare, then went back to the office. Someone asked him, later that day, if it was true that he’d ejected from the L.L.T.V. “Yeah,” he said.
That pitch of equanimity is pretty much beyond reckoning, and yet in other ways Armstrong was a regular Joe, with a touch of flatness in his features and delivery; I have written before, in this magazine, of the comb and the pack of Lifesavers that he bore in his pocket before launch, and those plain, precautionary measures strike me now as even more endearing. He was heading to a celestial body, this shy soul, for all the world as if he were going on a date. Like many of the astronauts, all of whom had started out as near-parodies of the clean-cut type, radiant with health and hope, he seemed to grow a little more expressive to look at, and listen to, with age, as if something in their journeys, sprung free from our usual gravity, had loosened up their frames and gentled them with wisdom.
Not that Armstrong was one for speeches; his deeds were enough, and, if there was something finally mysterious about him, a hint of the indecipherable, it was not, as I say, because of things locked or encrypted within his personal character, but just because what he achieved, however briefly, pulled him further out of our reach and range than anyone had ever ventured before. We claim to look up to those whom we admire; for three hours in the summer of ’69, however, if you wanted to check out where Armstrong was working that day, you really did have to look up—raise tired eyes from your newspaper, or your family, or your desk, and try the skies instead. He had stood somewhere new, and come back home; as with Lazarus, in St. John’s Gospel, we shall never see what he had seen—not on this planet, at any rate.
That may be why Saturday felt sad and substantial, as if the last known survivor of a war had passed away, even though, in this happy instance, so little blood was shed. “The odds is gone, / And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon.” That’s what Cleopatra thought, in her bereavement, but our restive age, in its quest for the remarkable, had a better idea: How about visiting the moon? Yeah. Much was asked of Neil Armstrong, and he was commensurate. He held attitude. We held our breath.
Photograph: NASA.