Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments

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.

They send their images, the latitudes and longitudes. They are like fortune tellers, the crew. Fortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop it.

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 an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.

it’s easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something.

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?

a tree made by the hand of nature, and a tree made by the hand of an artist. It’s barely any difference at all, and the profoundest difference in the world.

And I thought that day, he says, I remember thinking – who’d want to be an astronaut? It seemed kind of crass to me suddenly, like they were projections of all the sad frustrated men of America.

this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars.

Except it’s not even about that, 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.

and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses. It holds no possibility of opposition.