laura’s Reviews > Orbital > Status Update

‘The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.’

‘The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first. It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view, just as the sculpting force of gravity has made a sphere of the planet and pushed and pulled the tides which shape the coasts, so has politics sculpted and shaped and left evidence of itself everywhere.’

‘They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.’

‘Soon things change. After a week or so of city awe, the senses begin to broaden and deepen and it’s the daytime earth they come to love. It’s the humanless simplicity of land and sea. The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself. It’s the planet’s indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language.’

‘At first they’re drawn to the views at night—the gorgeous encrusting of city lights and the surface dazzle of man-made things. There’s something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries. […] 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.’

‘So strenuously unrobotic is the astronaut’s heart that it leaves the earth’s atmosphere and it presses out—gravity stops pressing in and the counterweight of the heart starts pressing out, as if suddenly aware it is part of an animal, alive and feeling. An animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses.’

‘What are you anyway as an astronaut but a conduit—you are selected for your non-stick temperament, maybe one day a robot could do your job and maybe it will; you have to wonder. […] But what would it be to cast out into space creations that had no eyes to see it and no heart to fear or exult in it?’

‘[…] they don’t come into space to be encouraged. They come out of a drive for more, more of everything, more knowledge and humility. Speed and stillness. Distance and closeness. More less, more more. And what they find is that they are small, no, nothing.’

‘[…] This is the way it goes—and then another day they look into the face of one of those five people and there in their way of smiling or concentrating or eating is everything and everyone they’ve ever loved, all of it, just there, and humanity, in coming down in its essence to this handful of people, is no longer a species of confounding difference and distance but a near and graspable thing.’ (3/3)

‘When they miss people and things, when earth feels so far away that depression washes over them for days and even the view of the sun setting over the Arctic isn’t enough to lift them, then they have to be able to see the face of one of the other on board and find something there that keeps them going. Some solace. They don’t always.’ (2/3)