Why had we come to the moon?

The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem.  What is this spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk even a reasonable certainty of death?  It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused.  Almost any man, if you put the thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of opportunities, will show that he knob as much.  Against his interest, against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things.  Some force not himself impels him, and go he must.  But why?  Why?  Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the things of another world, I took count of all my life.  Assuming I was to die a castaway upon the moon, I failed altogether to see what purpose I had served.  I got no light on that point, but at any rate it was clearer to me than it had ever been in my life before that I was not serving my own purpose, that all my life I had in truth never served the purposes of my private life.  Whose purposes, what purposes, was I serving? ...  I ceased to speculate on why we had come to the moon, and took a wider sweep.  Why had I come to the earth?  Why had I a private life at all? ...  I lost myself at last in bottomless speculations....

My thoughts became vague and cloudy, no longer leading in definite directions.  I had not felt heavy or weary—­I cannot imagine one doing so upon the moon—­but I suppose I was greatly fatigued.  At any rate I slept.

Slumbering there rested me greatly, I think, and the sun was setting and the violence of the heat abating, through all the time I slumbered.  When at last I was roused from my slumbers by a remote clamour, I felt active and capable again.  I rubbed my eyes and stretched my arms.  I rose to my feet—­I was a little stiff—­and at once prepared to resume my search.  I shouldered my golden clubs, one on each shoulder, and went on out of the ravine of the gold-veined rocks.

The sun was certainly lower, much lower than it had been; the air was very much cooler.  I perceived I must have slept some time.  It seemed to me that a faint touch of misty blueness hung about the western cliff I leapt to a little boss of rock and surveyed the crater.  I could see no signs of mooncalves or Selenites, nor could I see Cavor, but I could see my handkerchief far off, spread out on its thicket of thorns.  I looked bout me, and then leapt forward to the next convenient view-point.