Samantha’s Reviews > Orbital > Status Update

Okay, this is fast becoming my favourite of the shortlist - surpassing what I thought to be the unsurpassable James.

'Maybe one day we'll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we'll gather our breath and think: OK, we're alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life...'

'And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn't ask to be alive, we didn't ask to inherit the earth to look after, and we didn't ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.'

'Over fifty years without a human foot on its back, our moon, and does it turn its bright side in longing to the earth in the hope of the humans' return? Does it, and all of the other moons and planets and solar systems and galaxies, yearn to be known?'

...But there are no new thoughts. They're just old thoughts born into new moments - and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn't survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.'

'The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.'