'If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . .'

“For the first time in his life, he was going Outside.”

This sentence establishes the main dramatic event of the story while further elaborating on the futuristic setting. Going outside (which is capitalized as if it were something unusually important) is something Marvin has never done before, so the reader can infer both that Marvin’s world is unlike the real one and that something important is going to happen once Marvin is no longer indoors.

“He had seen it in photographs, of course: he had watched it imaged on television screens a hundred times. But now it was lying all around him, burning beneath the fierce sun that crawled so slowly across the jet-black sky.”

That Marvin has seen the “Outside” only in pictures and on television further emphasizes how unknown it is, creating suspense regarding what Marvin will find. The passage also uses lyrical language to describe the environment, with personified reference to the “fierce sun” and its animal-like movement across the sky. This figurative language underscores the power of the natural world and humanity’s insignificance in comparison.

“[The stars] were intense unscintillating points, and suddenly he remembered a rhyme he had once read in one of his father’s books:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are.

Well, he knew what the stars were. Whoever asked that question must have been very stupid. And what did they mean by ‘twinkle’? You could see at a glance that all the stars shone with the same steady, unwavering light.”

Marvin’s association of the stars with a nursery rhyme is a reminder of his young age. However, Marvin’s rejection of the nursery rhyme’s wisdom indicates his readiness to grow up, developing the theme of Coming of Age as an Individual and a Species. The episode also subtly hints at the story’s true setting: The reason the stars do not twinkle is because the Moon has no atmosphere, unlike Earth.

“Father was driving with a reckless and exhilarating skill as if—it was a strange thought to come into a child’s mind—he was trying to escape from something.”

Marvin’s observations help characterize the father, showing his emotional tension and agitation. At the same time, they also reveal Marvin’s initial recognition that something unusually important—perhaps even alarming—is happening. Marvin is seeing this side of his father for the first time, just as he is seeing the Outside for the first time. The mysteriousness of the father not only creates suspense but also lays the groundwork for the story’s exploration of Legacy and the Relationship Between Fathers and Sons, as Marvin’s ancestral homeland—Earth—is as strange and distant as his father’s behavior.

“There could be no way forward—yet there was. Marvin clenched his fists as the car edged over the slope and started the long descent. Then he saw the barely visible track leading down the mountainside, and relaxed a little. Other men, it seemed, had gone this way before.”

This passage contains a moment of apparent physical danger, supplying a bit of excitement in a story in which not much has happened previously. With the reference to others that have gone before, the end of the passage foreshadows Marvin’s father’s message about Marvin’s duty to pass on the tradition of Earth to future generations.

“There was no sign that men had ever explored this land, but once they passed the skeleton of a crashed rocket, and beside it a stone cairn surmounted by a metal cross.”

The crashed rocket embodies some of The Dangers of Technology. Whoever piloted the rocket presumably trusted it would keep them safe in an environment inhospitable to human life, but the presence of a grave-marker implies that their hopes were misplaced. The use of the word “skeleton” to describe the rocket further underscores the precarity of human technology by associating it with bodies subject to death and decomposition. The episode foreshadows the father’s remark that the colonists cannot rely exclusively on their technical achievements to survive.

“The sun was now low behind the hills on the right: the valley before them should be in total darkness. Yet it was awash with a cold white radiance that came spilling over the crags beneath which they were driving. Then, suddenly, they were out in the open plain, and the source of the light lay before them in all its glory.”

This key passage introduces the symbol of reflected light just as Earth is coming into Marvin’s view. Clarke’s imagery (“cold white radiance”) encourages the reader to experience the event viscerally so that the symbol sinks in on an emotional as well as an intellectual level; that the light is “cold” hints at the disturbing nature of what Marvin is about to learn.

“It was beautiful, and it called to his heart across the abyss of space. There in that shining crescent were all the wonders that he had never known—the hues of sunset skies, the moaning of the sea on pebbled shores, the patter of falling rain, the unhurried benison of snow. These and a thousand others should have been his rightful heritage, but he knew them only from the books and ancient records, and the thought filled him with the anguish of exile.”

Marvin’s sight of Earth illustrates the deep feeling of which Marvin is capable and encourages the reader to share in those painful feelings of loss and exclusion; Clarke suggests that humans have an innate connection to their home planet that life in the lunar colony simply cannot replicate. The story’s word choice is frequently religious—a “benison,” for example, is a blessing—amplifying the sense of humanity’s wrongdoing by casting it as a transgression against the miraculousness of Earth itself.

“Then Marvin, his eyes no longer blinded by the glare, saw that the portion of the disc that should have been in darkness was gleaming faintly with an evil phosphorescence: and he remembered. He was looking upon the funeral pyre of a world—upon the radioactive aftermath of Armageddon. Across a quarter of a million miles of space, the glow of dying atoms was still visible, a perennial reminder of the ruined past. It would be centuries yet before that deadly glow died from the rocks and life could return again to fill that silent, empty world.”

This passage reveals what happened on Earth and why Marvin has only seen it in photographs. Clarke juxtaposes this description of “evil phosphorescence” against the previous description of Earth’s beauty to jolt the reader into a greater appreciation of what has happened. The reference to “centuries” provides another important detail that will be crucial for what comes next: the father’s insistence that humanity must one day return to Earth.

“And now Father began to speak, telling Marvin the story which until this moment had meant no more to him than the fairy-tales he had heard in childhood.”

This is the first time the father speaks to Marvin, which alerts the reader to the significance of what he will say. The mention of fairy tales and of Marvin’s childhood in the past tense indicates that Marvin is beginning to leave his childhood behind. This coming of age coincides with Marvin’s realization of what Earth’s loss truly means.

“Then had followed the years of despair, and the long-drawn battle for survival in their fierce and hostile world. That battle had been won, though barely: this little oasis of life was safe against the worst that Nature could do. But unless there was a goal, a future towards which it could work, the Colony would lose the will to live and neither machines nor skill nor science could save it then.”

Marvin and the reader learn the real reason for this excursion simultaneously: to explain the importance of humanity maintaining its sense of purpose. The father claims that this is something that people must do for themselves without assistance from their technology. Human inventions are “barely” able to preserve life when pitted against the full force of “Nature;” they certainly cannot supply humans with a reason to live, the story suggests.

“So, at last, Marvin understood the purpose of this pilgrimage. He would never walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills. Yet one day—how far ahead?—his children’s children would return to claim their heritage. The winds and the rains would scour the poisons from the burning lands and carry them to the sea, and in the depths of the sea they would waste their venom until they could harm no living things. Then the great ships that were still waiting here on the silent, dusty plains could lift once more into space, along the road that led to home.”

Clarke states the father’s message explicitly. This is the message that fathers must continue passing along to their children until Earth is habitable again. Once again, the language is religious; Marvin and his father have made a “pilgrimage” in a show of faith that one day Earth will be habitable again. This is something they cannot know but must simply believe: For them, Earth is nothing more than a “lost and legendary world,” and nothing they do can speed up the natural processes that may someday neutralize the leftover radiation.

“That was the dream: and one day, Marvin knew with a sudden flash of insight, he would pass it on to his own son, here at this same spot with the mountains behind him and the silver light from the sky streaming into his face.”

Clarke here explicitly ties Earth’s legacy to the father-son relationship, with Marvin realizing that he will one day be in the role of the father taking his son to view the Earth. The interchangeability and anonymity of these roles—sons become fathers who have sons who will grow up to be fathers—underscores humanity’s insignificance in the broader scheme of things.