Orbital
Something I think about — way too much probably — is whether or not it is possible to live in a vacuum. (Not saying I want to! Just that I find it sort of fascinating, speaking as someone who has lived in many different places.) How much, and to what degree, do our contexts and cultures influence the core of our beings? Of course I have no idea….not that there exists some sort of scientific or quantifiable answer to this brain teaser anyway.
Orbital, the 2024 Booker winner by Samantha Harvey, presents this thought experiment except that the “vacuum” is a space station. Each astronaut/cosmonaut (6 of them, from the US, Russia, Italy, the UK, and Japan) has his or her own contexts, of course: families, cultures, languages. But here they are, 250 miles from Earth, creating their own unique culture mostly separate (but not quite, because it’s impossible for humans to forget/ignore everything) from what they knew before.
It’s been a very distracted summer for me. Orbital is more complex and more deserving than this simple write-up. In some ways I feel like I am, actually, in a temporary vacuum — which can have its pluses and minuses depending on how you choose to see it. Sort of like this: “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. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”
originally published on instagram