Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

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.

The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts

A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places

that struck her, how long it has been since she was ill – she feels in space as though her body is young again and there are no aches or pains, except for the space headaches they all get

What the shrug means is that 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.

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. 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.

This typhoon that’s another ninety minutes bigger, ninety minutes bolder, and closer to land. It’s not anger, as people tend to say. It doesn’t look from here anything like anger. More like defiance, strength, vivacity, the bulge-eyed tongue-out warrior face worn in the haka.

that you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary.

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.

that’s what we’re doing when we come into space, asserting our species by extending its territory. Space is the one remaining wilderness we have. The solar system into which we venture is just the new frontier now our earthly frontiers have been discovered and plundered.

But soon their bodies seemed to accept the change, and the acceptance was felt as a kind of peacekeeping.