Isolation and the Limits of Human Connection Theme Analysis

Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one.

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.

None of them knows what to say to Chie, what consolation you can offer to someone who suffers the shock of bereavement while in orbit. You must want surely to get home, and say some sort of goodbye. No need to speak; you only have to look out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. 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 and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.

At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides; now, out of necessity, they’ve come to see that their family is this one here, these others who know the things they know and see the things they see, with whom they need no words of explanation. When they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were? They want no view except this view from the window of the solar arrays as they taper into emptiness. No rivets in the entirety of the world will do except these rivets around the window frames. They want padded gangways for the rest of their lives. This continuous hum.

This is a strange thing, it seems to her. All your dreams of adventure and freedom and discovery culminate in the aspiration to become an astronaut, and then you get up here and you are trapped, and spend your days packing and unpacking things, and fiddle in a laboratory with pea shoots and cotton roots, and go nowhere but round and round with the same old thoughts going round and round with you.

Where do the boundaries sit, Shaun thinks as he moves past the window. He tries to place it all – Montenegro, Serbia, Hungary, Romania, he can never remember the exact arrangement. You could spend your days, your entire orbiting life, with your Rand McNally Atlas and your maps of the stars. You could do no work whatsoever. You could abandon it all, just to look. You could know the earth inside out, in its little hollow of space. You could never really comprehend the stars, but the earth you could know in the way you know another person, in the way he came quite studiedly and determinedly to know his wife. With a yearning that’s hungry and selfish. He wishes to know it, inch by inch.

Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photograph, it is said, and this has always been a source of great enchantment. Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.

Anton has never really understood that claim, or at least the enchantment of it. What of all the people on the other side of the earth that the camera can’t see, and everybody in the southern hemisphere which is in night and gulped up by the darkness of space? Are they in the photograph? In truth, nobody is in that photograph, nobody can be seen […] The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself—his eye at the view-finder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release. In that sense, the more enchanting thing about Collins’s image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains.

Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive. So what do they do? What action to take? And what use are words? They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.

She and her husband exchange photographs almost daily; sometimes his view of the lough and the mountain and a bloodied sunset, sometimes a close-up of an icicle or sheep ear or flower or gatepost, sometimes the sea or the clouds reflected in the wet sand, once the night sky and a drawn circle where their spacecraft was travelling across – not visible in the photo but a caption: You Are Were Here. By the time you get this, he wrote in his message, you’ll have been round the world another eight or nine times. You’ve got to admit that it’s difficult, he said, having a wife flying above you at seventeen thousand miles an hour. Never knowing where she is or where to find her.

Absently Anton runs his fingers over a lump that’s appeared on his neck the last fortnight and that he tries to obscure by raising the collar of his polo shirt. The last thing you need is to get sick in space. They’ll worry and send you home and, because you can’t fly back on your own, two others will have to go with you, and to cut short the missions of those two others would be unforgivable. He’ll say nothing to the flight surgeon or to his fellow crew and he’ll hope nobody notices. It’s the size of a cherry in the low hollow of his neck, and perfectly painless.

Pietro doesn’t dream. He has a rare night of deep and solid unthinking sleep. His breaths and heartbeats are smooth and few, his face resolved of its creases, his body a well of atom-self, an unworried sum of parts, as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing more for him to do. Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. 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.