Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

The earth is the answer to every question. 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.

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.

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.

all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.

and they know that their being alive in this moment depends on cells just like these in their own puny pulsing hearts.

and companionship is our consolation for being trivial.

It wants what it wants and hopes what it hopes and needs what it needs and loves what it loves.

Remember this, each of them thinks. Remember this.

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? The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable.

He seemed to be full of this wanting, him and my uncle, like it made their own lives feel both empty and full at once. I didn’t like it.

and a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful because they’re alive, like a child.

They’re beautiful because there’s a light in their eyes. Sometimes destructive, sometimes hurtful, sometimes selfish, but beautiful because alive. And progress is like that, by its nature alive.

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.

That the ride of your life will pass in an eyeblink, just as life does to the aging brain whose slowing makes everything appear to move faster.

Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

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 past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.

We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there’s only space, an expansion expanding into itself, an emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing.