Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

To cope with that large variety of daily experiences which were not easy to anticipate or to comprehend, yet were not terrifying so much as confusing, Aquarius now added to the Navigator the services of a Novelist. It seemed to him that everybody, literate and illiterate alike, had in the privacy of their unconscious worked out a vast social novel by which they could make sense of society. Obviously, each novel was different. Obviously, some were better than others. But whether each unwritten novel was a comprehensive work of art, or an unhappy one, the psychic fact was that as life presented new evidence, the book was altered in its details. When such large events as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, successes, failures, social cataclysms and social revelations were sufficiently unexpected to indicate the conception one had of society—that conception so often forged by inferior art and entertainment—was faulty, then the outlines of the novel would be drastically revised; in effect the Novelist was forever drawing up new social charts upon which the Navigator could make his calculations.