Books to Ponder: "Orbital"
Perceptions of Earth from space. What is time? And where do words come from?
There are so many startling headlines in the news these days that every single post on here could be about politics and democracy. But I do think it’s important not to get sooo overwhelmed by the news that we lose track of other things that are important in life. So I will do my best to continue sprinkling in posts about other topics that are worth pondering and/or activities that are worth doing.
Here, then, is a new “Books to ponder” post. Somewhat of a companion piece to “Politics, Literature, and a Book Festival” from a few weeks ago because it follows up on a book I first mentioned there.
Today’s book: “Orbital”
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, won last year’s Booker Prize. The entire story takes place on a single day aboard the space station, during 16 orbits around the Earth. It traces a day in the life of six astronauts while serving as a meditation on life, Earth, and the environment.
If you’re looking for an action-filled plot, you won’t find it here. The story follows the astronauts as they go about their fairly mundane daily lives: conducting experiments, doing maintenance work, exercising, etc. But the mundaneness is paired with feelings of awe as they sail above the Earth and traverse the vacuum of space.
Harvey’s descriptions are vivid and poetic. It’s easy to see why she visualized the book as being “as much a painting as a novel,” as she said in her book festival appearance. But amidst the descriptions of life aboard the space station are also various philosophical meanderings that are triggered partly by the individual lives of the astronauts, but mostly by the transcendence of what they’re experiencing in space. And — for me at least — the book sparked additional musings even beyond this.
So here are five thoughts to ponder from Orbital.
1. What is time?
This book surely makes you question how we perceive time. Not in some grand “time is an illusion” sort of way — but rather when you realize that astronauts experience 16 sunrises and sunsets in what is otherwise a single 24-hour day (something I’d admittedly never really thought about before) it causes you to wonder about how we sense and interact with time.
The space shuttle orbits the earth once every 90 minutes, or 16 times every 24 hours, which means that every 45 minutes the astronauts alternate between seeing the planet in daylight or in darkness. But if there is a sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes, how does one know how time is passing, or what day it is?
Harvey writes:
They feel space trying to rid them of the notion of days. It says: what’s a day? … They cling to their twenty-four hour clock because it’s all the feeble little time-bound body knows … But the mind goes free within the first week.
It raises the question of whether we all live on a 24-hour cycle of time because that’s what our bodies expect … or because we’re conditioned that way because of when the sun rises and sets?
Turns out it might actually be the latter.
That was the experience of the French scientist and explorer Michel Siffre, who did experiments that led him to live underground for months at a time without any external stimuli telling him how time was passing. His circadian rhythms changed, sometimes causing him to stay awake for 36 hours before sleeping for 12, and he experienced time twice as slowly as people did above the surface.
His experiments have been studied by NASA for clues as to how astronauts might be affected by extended time in space, and Siffre’s experience showed that our understanding and experience of time is tied to the hours of daylight and darkness we experience as the planet turns on its axis. But when we’re in space or in a cave or wherever, well, our sense of time becomes untethered from what we typically regard as normal.
2. Earth as Gaia
Nearly a half-century ago, the scientist James Lovelock published a Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, proposing that living organisms interact with and co-evolve with the planet’s environment. His hypothesis was that Earth and all life on the planet essentially function as a single organism.
As Lovelock wrote in The Ages of Gaia, a follow-up to his first book:
[Gaia] is about a new theory of evolution, one that does not deny Darwin’s great vision but adds to it by observing that the evolution of the species of organisms is not independent of the evolution of their material environment. Indeed the species and their environment are tightly coupled and evolve as a single system.
Harvey doesn’t discuss this idea explicitly in Orbital, though she does allude to a sense of the interconnectedness of the planet. For instance, while writing about the astronauts watching from space as weather systems develop:
It’s not so much that the earth is one thing and the weather another, but that they’re the same. The earth has its air currents, the air currents the earth, just as a face is not separate from the expressions it makes.
It’s not a shock to consider the idea of Earth as an interconnected whole, but it’s a good reminder of our relation to and interdependence with the planet on which we exist.
3. No borders from space
Similarly, and not surprisingly, the astronauts in Orbital also muse about the obvious lack of borders as their spaceship sails past continents and mountains and seas that seem “almost endlessly connected.” And it makes them wonder: “Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth?”
The thought reminds me of lyrics from the song Moon Rider, written by Paul and Ralph Colwell of Up with People — which are based on the recollections of Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last astronaut to walk on the Moon.
I can see the white of snow-capped mountains
The blues and turquoise of the oceans blend.
Australia and Asia coming round the corner
And I can’t tell where one country starts and the other one ends.
4. Politics is life
Harvey, though, also pivots off this sense of interconnectedness to bring the reality and necessity of politics back into the picture. While acknowledging the beauty of Earth from space, and the way the planet exudes a sense of interdependence, the astronauts also realize that politics, in fact, is integral to everything that happens on the planet they’re orbiting and to which they’ll soon return.
Astronauts can see the Egyptian pyramids from space, they can see the lights of cities and highways, they can even see the reflection of hundreds of acres of greenhouses in southern Spain. They can also see retreating glaciers and disappearing forests, evaporated lakes and oil spills. Harvey imagines the astronauts seeing that everything on Earth, in the end, both good and bad, is related to politics.
My words, not hers, but in essence the astronauts come to understand that the borders we create, the economies we build, the research we do, the schools we design, the buildings we live and work in, the pollution we spew into the air, all of it on some level comes down to a political decision.
It’s not so different, really, from what I initially wrote when kicking off this blog: While there is more to life than politics, it’s also true that politics is life. It’s knitted into nearly every aspect of our existence, whether we want it to be or not.
5. Where do words come from?
Harvey described her book as a painting, but as you read Orbital some of the writing will also remind you of lines that may have been composed by a poet. She writes of “embroidered urban tapestries,” of “rose-flushed mountains,” and of city lights being an “electric screech in soft swirling desert.” She describes Earth as “an epic poem of flowing verses” that floats in a “waltzing universe.”
And it makes you wonder: Where do some writers find the words that make their way onto a page? Where do the words come from?
Is it mere persistence, crafting one sentence after another until it’s all just perfect? Is it a sort of magical conjuring of words? Are some writers better at tapping into some universal stream of creativity?
There is no right answer, it may well be all of the above.
But it did make me think of an interview Bob Dylan did a few years back in which he touches on this question. So let’s end there, with the songwriter expressing amazement himself at some of the songs he once wrote, with a sense of wonder about where his words came from: