Things mattering and then not mattering

It seems easier on balance not to read the news. Some do and some don't, but it's easier not to. When they look at the planet it's hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it's as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with. They might listen to the news and feel instantly tired or impatient. The stories a litany of accusation, angst, anger, slander, scandal that speaks a language both too simple and too complex, a kind of talking in tongues, when compared to the single clear, ringing noted that seems to emit from the hanging planet they now see each morning whey open their eyes. The earth shrugs it off with its every rotation.

I finished reading Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, a couple of weeks ago. I'd picked it up just after, I think, it was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize, but before it was longlisted for the Tournament of Books. 

I started reading it in December while enjoying days at the spa, my copy has the steam-curled pages to prove it. I loved its meditative quality, I drifted on that for a while.

At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in — a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places — from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they're trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are footholds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being is space — which is everything — ambushes them with happiness, and it isn't so much that they don't want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded — grown so big, so distended and full, that it's caved in on itself.

(I could use that kind of ambush.)

But then, you know, I stopped caring. Not gonna lie, it was kinda boring. I couldn't remember what, if anything, had happened. I wasn't really sure who the characters were or why they mattered — their backstories were irrelevant, none of them had character. 

Do you know what I'll look forward to getting back to, when the time comes? he says. Things I don't need, that's what. Pointlessness. Some pointless ornament on a shelf.

I'm all about pointlessness, plotlessness, slow reading, slow living, stasis. And this novel offers moments of awe. But the world keeps turning. We gaze at the beautiful painting, then move on.

Harvey renders Sagan's Cosmic Character in a grippingly poetic way; one wonders what does human history matter against the cosmos. Not a bit. Except when you're in it, it's everything.