There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

Out there, electromagnetic vibrations ripple through the vacuum as bodies in space give out light. If these vibrations are translated into sounds then the planets each have their own music, the sound of their light. The sound of their magnetic fields and ionospheres, their solar winds, the radio waves trapped between the planet and its atmosphere.

Let there be light, he seems quietly to say.

Krikalev seems to look out now from the photograph as a god looks on its creation, with a patient forbearance. Humankind is a band of sailors, he’s thinking, a brotherhood of sailors out on the oceans. Humankind is not this nation or that, it is all together, always together come what may.

human being was not made to stand still.

And even when you sleep you feel the earth turning, just as you feel a person lying next to you. You feel it there.

Away from the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals, teetering slightly on its canting orbit, away into virgin up-for-sale wilderness, this new black gold, this new domain ripe for the taking. Through their quarter-of-a-million-mile sward of space.

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented.