[P.1] "Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene."
The thread of common humanity runs deep through this book but start far from the surface for six astronauts on the International Space Station.
[6] "And so it is, but in this new day they'll circle the earth sixteen times. They'll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights. Roman clasps the handrail by the window to steady himself; the southern hemisphere stars are fleeting away. You're bound to Coordinated Universal Time, ground crews tell them. Be clear with yourself on this matter, always clear. Look often at your watch to anchor your mind, tell yourself when you wake up: this is the morning of a new day."
I found that on orbit seven, page one hundred, for a moment I confused sun-up with whatever the morning means in this context, just like during many other ascending orbits in this book. Only one of the many ways that we're coaxed into viewing humanity and ourselves from a wildly different lens. We are the biological product of our environment, both in terms of our own lifetime and in evolutionary time.
[75] "The mice seem to take this news with a degree of stoicism. That's what you must be, she says. Always stoic. She strokes her thumb along a sharp spine. She will miss her mother's bone-picking ceremony, when they comb the ashes for fragments of bone that survived cremation. Missing that will be the hardest thing."
In the Space Station or on Earth, we can't help but experience now through our past and our memories. This is one of the many intimately human moments in this book, more of which belong to the Japanese astronaut, Chie as she thinks about her mother.
[79] "He should have said, I don't know my love. That would have been true. Because who can look at man's neurotic assault on the planet and find it beatiful? Man's hubris. A hubris so almighty it's matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love."
While this book isn't a lover's glance at Earth, neither is it a particularly loving glance at humanity.
[94] "We have all been travelling, the crew thinks, travelling for years with barely a moment of settling; all of us living out of bags and borrowed places, hotels, space centres and training facilities, sleeping on friends' sofas in midway cities between one training course and another. Living in caves and submarines and deserts to test our mettle. If we have any single thing in common it's our acceptance of belonging nowhere and everywhere in order to reach this, this near-mythical craft. This last nationless, borderless outpost that strains against the tethers of biological life."
Rather than looking at Earth with a lover's eye, as the quote from The Guardian says, it's looking at this small sample of humanity from the same up-close perspective, under strains and conditions unimaginable to all but a few. The subject is not the stars or Earth or space in its vastness but humanity. Only under very different pressures.
[102] "...it's then that you look down with a fuller view, as if to check that the earth and its seas are not just dreams or mirages, and there it is again, earth, turning blue and cloud-scudded and improbably soft against the truss of the craft you are navigating around. No longer frightening at all, instead a sight of such magnificence it shoots your senses apart."
That's not to say that the views of Earth don't invoke our senses of awe and wonder. But it's somewhat meaningless to separate ourselves from Earth in this way, and maybe it's pointless to argue that the book's concern is 'us' rather than Earth. We are the Earth's product, but not bounded by its constraints. We can escape Earth's atmosphere and gaze back down at it, our source and place of inception, individually, as a species, as a terrestrial lifeform.
[102] "...wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this."
Still not a lover's glance.
[102] "Dusk steals upon you and the earth is a brusing of azure and purple and green, and you remove your sun visor and turn on your light and darkness brings out the stars and Asia passes by bejewelled and you work in your light-pool until the sun comes up once more behind you and burnishes an ocean you can't identify. Daylight spills blue on a snowy landmass moving into view and, against the black, the rim of the earth is a light bright mauve that brings a pain of elation to the gut. What might be the Gobi Desert rolls out beneath you while ground crews give soothing instructions and your partner leafs through the manual attached to the arm of his spacesuit and you can just about see his face through the sun visor, a tranquil oval of a human face in the enormous anonymity of your landscape, and meanwhile the solar arrays drink the sun until dusk comes back and your partner is blackened by the sunset behind him and night creeps from the underside of the earth and engulfs it."
Gasp...! From the vantage point of a cosmic stone's-throw from Earth, her patterns of shape and color come into relief like a mosaic. Nell's space-walk changes the way she 'sees' space (from an inside window: "It's like looking through the bars at an animal you once ran with."), and while she's out there, her breathless run-on stream-of-consciousness reads like the unbroken Penelope episode of Ulysses. I'm sure I in the same shoes would be even less articulate. And later, "...the only word that seems to apply to it is unearthly. It can't possibly be real. Forget all you know. You look back at the vast spread of the space station and in this moment it, not earth, feels like home." Perhaps it doesn't make a difference. And that's the point.
[106] "The night's electric excess takes their breath. The spread of life. The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here. And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there's only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India. That's all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone."
Out of sight, out of mind. Infantile country-first populist nationalism looks a lot different from space. A wonderful proclamation of life and common humanity dwarfs the terrible myopic divisions of our design. But even the astronauts seem to tire of it: "...it's the daytime earth they come to love. It's the humanless simplicity of land and sea."
[] "They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You'll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you'll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for... There's no wall or barrier -- no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear."
The same could be said of transcendent experience on Earth. To gaze into the Grand Canyon, or look down from Mount Everest, or from an escarpment into an uninhabited valley. To view the rest of our miserable species as equally deserving of respect, happiness, a chance at The Good Life is not the same as absorbing the pain of all who are robbed of respect, happiness, life.
[141] "Then, when he first caught sight of the lump on his neck it seemed - though he can't truly say why - the logical culmination of all those dawnings, those realisations that he and his wife didn't love each other and that life was too wide and too short. He's felt since then resolved, in possession of a crucial new piece of information. Zabudem, ladno? he'll say to his wife when he returns to earth, and she'll answer quickly without surprise and with a short nod, Ladno, proekhali. Let's So easy an answer two a question they hadn't known to ask. He tugs his collar stiffly up."
Distance engenders clarity? Distance makes the heart grow colder?
[144] "This six, and those who've come before them, are the lab rats who've made all things possible. They're the specimens and the objects of research who've forged the way for their own surpassing. One day their journeys to space will seem nothing but a coach excursion, and the horizons of possibility that open out at their fingers will only confirm their own smallness and briefness. They swim in microgravity like little watched fish. The heart cells they culture will one day be used to replace those of the slingshotting astronauts bound for Mars. But not their own, which are fated to die. They take blood, urine, faecal and saliva samples, monitor their heart rates and blood pressure and sleep patterns, document any ache, pain or unusual sensation. They are data. Above all else, that. A means and not an end."
The astronauts seem to take this news with a degree of stoicism.
[145] "It's about those four astronauts on their way now to the moon, and the next men and women, the men and women who will one day be going to live on a new lunar station, those who will go into deeper space, the decades of men and women who'll come after them. Except it's not even about that, it's just about the future and the siren song of other worlds, some grand abstract dream of interplanetary life, of humanity uncoupled from its hobbled earth and set free; the conquest of the void."
Beginnings of infinity.
[159] "Pietro stares for a while at the painting, and a while longer, then says, It's the dog."
The only thing not 'looking'.
[160] "And how the dog is the only thing in the painting that isn't slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities. The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free."
Of all the possible subjects of Las Meninas, it's the dog that Harvey sees as free, not laughable, not trapped.
[161] "So Shaun thinks and as he slips the postcard back in its pouch he feels like laughing at the question before him. How are we writing the future of humanity? We're not writing anything, it's writing us. We're windblown leaves. We think we're the wind, but we're just the leaf."
Beautiful.
"And isn't it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are."
Some, more than others, help remind us this deepity, that of our sometimes miserable species' primate provenance.
[169] "In the cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big Bang happening on January 1st, almost fourteen billion years ago, when a supercharged universe-dense speck of energy blew open at the speed of faster-than-light and a thousand trillion degrees Celcius, an explosion that had to create the space it exploded into since there was no space, no something, no nothing, it was near the end of January that the first galaxies were born, almost a whole month and a billion years of atoms moving in cosmic commotion until they began to flock bombshell-bright in furnaces of hydrogen and helium we now call stars, the stars themselves flocking into galaxies until, almost two billion years later on March 16th, one of these galaxies, the Milky Way, was formed, and a six-billion-year summer passed in routine havoc until, at the end of August, a shockwave from a supernova might have casued a slowly rotating solar nebula to collapse - who knows? - but in any case it did collapse and in its condensed centre a star formed what we call our sun, and around it a disc of planets, in some cosmic clumping thumping clashing banging Wild West shootout of rock and gas and headlong combat of matter and gravity, and this is August."
Cosmic calendar accounts of the formation of the universe, up to 'today', are a dime a dozen. But none like this.
[171] "...but the mammalian things, who quicksharp by mid-afternoon on New Year's Eve had evolved into their most opportunistic and crafty form, the igniters of fire, the hackers in stone, the melters of iron, the ploughers of earth, the worshippers of gods, the tellers of time, the sailors of ships, the wearers of shoes, the traders of grain, the discoverers of lands, the schemers of systems, the weavers of music, the singers of song, the mixers of paint, the binders of books, the crunchers of numbers, the slingers of arrows, the observers of atoms, the adorners of bodies, the gobblers of pills, the splitters of hairs, the scratchers of heads, the owners of minds, the losers of minds, the predators of everything, the arguers with death, the lovers of excess, the excess of love, the addled with love, the deficit of love, the lacking for love, the longing for love, the two-legged thing, the human being."
The torrent of accomplishments and embarrassments continues at an eye-watering pace, but the pace is anything but unfeeling. Fascism, Frida Kahlo, FloJo. The deep state, dark matter, Dylan. It's all been within the blink of a cosmic eye. Both wonderful and terrible. Earlier, one of the astronauts has a thought about the inconsequence and the meaningfulness of humanity's candle's brief flame. This passage hits harder.