Someone with some expertise in physics told me once that the moon constantly falls towards the earth and that when I understood this, I would have better understood the nature of gravity. I thought about it for a long time, unable to get the point. I had a hunch about the meaning of this apparent paradox, many times I thought I had already grasped it, but nevertheless it eluded me and I was left with the sad disappointment about by my own stupidity. But in the end I experienced the longed-for enlightenment. The image of a satellite orbiting a planet and the feeling of my own weight merged in my mind into a coherent whole; the vision of a circular motion was transformed into the vision of a falling motion with just such a curvature that the trajectory of the satellite’s fall is exactly parallel to the planet’s surface. Gravity does not so much attract as change - it curves the movement. The moon’s movement around the earth is curved in such a specific way that it forms a circle. So if the colloquial phrase about gravity-induced falling is valid, then the moon permanently falls to earth, only before it has time to fall, it already on the other side.

Someone else explained to me why the moon appears larger the lower it is above the horizon, arguing that this is due to the illusion of the greater distance of the horizon from the zenith. That is, it seems to us that the sky above the earth is not a spherical sphere but an elongated dome and that what is overhead seems closer than on the horizon, so the mind has to correct this error of perception by producing an impression of the changing size of objects. This I grasped on the fly, but then I read somewhere that this hypothesis is not universally accepted as the correct one.

Someone else explained to me the mechanism of the sea tides by drawing pictures of the earth, the ocean, the moon and the sun, but I cannot yet understand this puzzle. I understand that it is not so much the attraction, but again the influence (nomen omen) on motion, the different inertia of the rocky sphere and the “water coat”, not only the moon’s circulation around the earth, but also the earth and moon around the sun, and the ocean around the earth, as well as the rotation of the earth itself around its own axis. But it doesn’t add up for me. I give up.

I dreamt of a bull. Unnaturally large and seemingly elongated. Massive, strong and aggressive. I was in an open area and the bull was attacking me relentlessly. I wasn’t particularly scared, but I was growing tired of having to watch the bull and run from it. The bull was also getting tired, but it looked like it still had plenty of strength left. I was not angry with it, nor was it angry with me. We were simply, unintentionally, in a relationship that was oppressive and potentially disastrous. It happened at night, in the bright moonlight.

(transl. Magdalena Małek-Andrzejowska)