Mapping Out A Sky
Sondheim and spaceflight
Walt Whitman, upon hearing the learn’d astronomer arranging proofs and figures before him, slipped out of the lecture-room and into the mystical moist night-air. There, he look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
This week, four astronauts travelled to the far side of the Moon, passing behind it and farther from the rest of us than any human being has ever been. There is, obviously, an engineering story to tell about Artemis II — a story with its own proofs, its own figures, with charts and diagrams worthy of much applause.
What lingers equally, though, is something harder to plot on a graph. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen were, in the simplest possible sense, away: beyond ordinary reach, beyond ordinary scale, at a distance that the rest of us can only imagine.
Sondheim, I think, understood that kind of distance. Distance as a human condition. Distance as exhilaration, as distortion, as loneliness, as a new vantage purchased at a cost. Today, I’d like to follow Whitman’s lead. Let us glide out of the lecture-room, drink in the night air, and incline our eyes skyward.
It’s 5:30 a.m. on Manhattan’s 110th Street. The year is 1957. On the rooftop of an old tenement building, a young man named Frank sits in his Army uniform, reading a script. Another young man, Charley, joins him, still waking up, binoculars around his neck. Soon their duet will become a trio; a pyjama-clad young woman named Mary will complete the group. On that rooftop, in the predawn air, they wait together, hoping to glimpse Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite.
Charley spots it first: “There! There it is!” Mary wonders how to pronounce the unfamiliar name: “Do you call it Sputnik — or Spootnik?” And Charley, without missing a beat, replies, “You call it a miracle.”
This is the final scene of Merrily We Roll Along. Frank, Charley, and Mary will soon be joined on that rooftop by the show’s full company, who drift up in bathrobes and hastily thrown-on coats — all drawn, as George Furth’s stage direction puts it, “to witness the birth of a new era in the sky.”
Merrily has prepared us for this moment. In “Opening Doors,” that whirlwind chronicle of creative beginnings in all their underpaid and overcommitted glory, our central trio speak the language of horizon and pursuit. “That faraway shore’s looking not too far,” they sing. “We’re following every star.” The future, for Frank, Charley, and Mary, is an approachable horizon; their aspiration shimmers with astronomy. Sondheim, reaching upward, places artistic ambition under an open sky.
The rooftop scene that ends Merrily resonates deeply because it captures several recognizably human responses at once: wonder, ambition, pride, uncertainty, a sense of history becoming visible. And, underneath it all, something else: the feeling that being alive in such a moment means standing at the edge of something larger still. “Something is stirring, shifting ground,” sings Frank, “It’s just begun…” The first satellite crosses the sky, and three young people feel not just that the world has changed, but that they themselves might change with it. “What a time to be starting out,” Frank says. “What a time to be alive.”
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Merrily’s Sputnik is an object. A remarkable object, an astonishing feat of engineering, but an object nonetheless. One wonders what the roughly 90-year-old Frank, Charley, and Mary would make of Artemis II. Four human beings fired into the sky, reaching a distance almost beyond comprehension. What a time to be alive, indeed. But it’s one thing to feel that exhilaration with our own feet firmly on the ground. To be the one out there is another matter entirely.
This is where Sunday in the Park with George begins to feel unexpectedly close. Not because astronauts are like Seurat’s figures in any literal sense. They are not. But Sondheim gives us, in “It’s Hot Up Here,” a startling language for what it is to be elevated into spectacle, set apart from ordinary motion, made visible on unusual terms:
It’s hot up here
And strange up here.
No change up here
Forever.How still it is,
How odd it is,
And God, it is
So hot!
We also hear in this number that “there’s not a breath of air up here” and, indeed, that “these helmets weigh a lot on us.” Maybe there are proto-astronauts among Seurat’s ranks. But perhaps the most stimulating lyric in “It’s Hot Up Here,” when viewed through our present lens, is this one:
Perspectives don’t make sense up here.
One of the strangest and most compelling things about the human dimension of spaceflight is what it does to proportion. Near and far don’t behave in the usual way. The Earth becomes, all at once, unimaginably vast and impossibly small. A crew can be the focus of global attention while also being, in practical terms, inaccessible (as this crew was for 40 minutes as they passed behind the Moon). Astronauts cross into a realm where ordinary human proportion no longer holds. They are not static like Seurat’s subjects; if anything, they are their inversion. They are the ones moving, while the rest of us hold still and watch. But the asymmetry remains. They occupy a place of visibility that is also a place of separation.
Seurat’s figures are, in Sunday’s conceit, trapped in the condition of being arranged for other people’s looking. They have been put somewhere elevated — elevated as art — and cannot come down. The Artemis crew were also arranged for looking. They existed, for the duration of the mission, as a public visual arrangement: trackable, framed, streamed. They could, more literally than George, “watch the rest of the world from a window” — but they were as much art as artist.
Sondheim and his collaborators were so often interested in what vantage does to feeling. They were drawn to people who can see clearly because they are set apart, and to the pain built into that clarity. Sometimes the separation is artistic; sometimes social; sometimes moral. Sometimes it is the simple fact of being placed where others are not. What Artemis II has made newly legible, perhaps, is the grandeur and strangeness of that condition. The four astronauts that make up its crew are pioneers, symbols, public faces of a civilizational project. They are also just four people, enclosed together, farther than anyone has ever been from those they love.
As the Artemis II crew completed their lunar flyby, Jeremy Hansen radioed mission control with a request. The crew wanted, he said, to name two craters on the Moon. The first they would call Integrity, after the name they had given to the Orion spacecraft. The second they would call Carroll.
Carroll was Reid Wiseman’s wife. She died of cancer in 2020, at the age of 46. She was a neonatal intensive care nurse. And in honoring her, the farthest journey yet made by any of us is forever tethered to something precious and human in scale. It’s a gesture that speaks to an ancient impulse: to name what we love, and to find it still before us when we lift our eyes.
Distance can be public and private at once. It is, perhaps, the truest way of discovering what remains closest when almost everything else falls away. Carroll, forever on the lunar surface; the odd, airless separateness of elevation; a miracle glimpsed from a rooftop; Whitman, gliding out into the night air and looking skyward. The proofs and figures matter enormously. Of course they do. But, in our quieter moments, we should let those learn’d voices distance and die. Until there’s nothing but sky. And in that mystical moist night-air, we should, from time to time, look up in perfect silence at the stars.
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I love the connections you made in this… – as much of emotions linked arm-in-arm as facts… – so thank you hugely.