The Distance of the Moon

At one time, according to Sir Geore Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. 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.
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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 they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, then the other.
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“Every shiny fish is floating, floating; and every dark fish is at the bottom, at the bottom of the sea…”
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When I felt her rising into the Moon’s sphere I was heartsick at that lost contact.
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Above me the enormous lunar disc no longer seemed the same as before: it had become much smaller, it kept contracting, as if my gaze were driving it away and the emptied sky gaped like an abyss where, at the botton, the stars had begun multiplying, and the night poured a river of emptiness over me, drowned me in dizziness and alarm.
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I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, nor she that She, for me. I was eager to return to the Earth, and I trembled at the fear of having lost it. The fulfilment of my dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united, spinning between Earth and Moon; torn from its earthly soil, my love now knew on the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.
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And if the Moon now tended to go away from him, then he would take delight in this separation just as, till now, he had delighted in the Moon’s nearness.