I just read the most amazing short novel, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, a book that won this year’s top British literary award, The Booker Prize. It’s about six people on the international space station, and a day in their lives, but it’s really about time, meaning, purpose, the earth, humanity, our politics, the cosmos, and so much more. It’s like a prose poem of ecstatic musings. Harvey takes you inside the minds and hearts and bodies of the 4 astronauts and 2 cosmonauts as they circle the earth at 17,500 miles an hour, experiencing 16 sunrises and sunsets in one 24 hour period. I’ll quote a few passages and resist the temptation to quote the entire book. Do yourself a HUGE favor and get it and read it. 207 small pages with good print size. Easy to read. Transporting. Ethereal. And practical. Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Orbital-Samantha-Harvey/dp/0802161545/?tag=tomvmorriscom-20&ref_=pe_584750_33951330
Referring to the Japanese astronaut who just got word her mother has died:
Chie’s only mother now is that rolling, glowing ball that throws itself involuntarily around the sun once a year. Chie has been made an orphan, her father dead a decade. That ball is the only thing she can point to now that has given her life. There’s no life without it. Without that planet there’s no life. Obvious. (12)
Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the centre of everything. It seems so spectacular, so dignified and regal. They could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there, at the very centre of the waltzing universe, and they could forget all those truths men and women had uncovered (via a jerking and stuttering path of discovery followed by denial followed by discovery followed by cover-up) that the earth is a piddling speck at the centre of nothing. They could think: no negligible thing could shine so bright, no far-hurled nothing satellite could bother itself with these shows of beauty, no paltry rock could arrange such intricacy of fungus and minds. (40)
This thing that habours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific inquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through. (41)
Pietro, the Italian, looking through the window at the earth below:
Radiance itself. What would it be to lose this? (52)
Nell wants to ask Shaun how it is he can be an astronaut and believe in God, a Creationist God, but she knows what his answer would be. He’d ask how it is that she can an astronaut and not believe in God. They’d draw a blank. She’d point out of the port and starboard windows, where the darkness is endless and ferocious. Where solar systems and galaxies are violently scattered. Where the field of view is so deep and multidimensional that the warp of space-time is something you can almost see. Look, she’d say, What made that but some heedless hurling beautiful force?
And Shaun would point out of the port and starboard windows where the darkness is endless and ferocious, at exactly the same violently scattered solar systems and galaxies and at the same deep and multidimensional field of view warped with space-time and he would say: what made that but some heedful hurling beautiful force?”
Is that all the difference there is between their views, then - a bit of heed? Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? [It gets better but I’ll stop here] (66-67)
When an astronaut remembers his daughter asking whether progress is a good or bad thing and he said it’s beautiful, and then on the orbits of earth he reconsiders:
Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. (79)
At night. City lights in the blackness of space:
The night’s electric excess takes their breath away. The spread of life. The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here. (106)
There is a passage on the beauty of earth and the awfulness of human conduct that rises to the level of a symphony of insight and poetry that goes from pages 108-110 and would take too long to quote. But it’s one of the finest passages of the book, and maybe of any book. The ugliness of our politics, marring the surface of a gorgeous planet, described in amazing terms.
Pages 169-173 give the best cosmic history I’ve ever seen, and in terms that are unforgettable. Don’t believe me, go read them. As if since the big bang a year has passed. What happened in each month or minute. But better than ever has been said.
Pietro sleeps and dreams:
Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. (184)
And there is much more.
https://www.amazon.com/Orbital-Samantha-Harvey/dp/0802161545/?tag=tomvmorriscom-20&ref_=pe_584750_33951330
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