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

they’d all at some point walked in. And

the non-Russian segment

But what would it be to cast out into space creations that had no eyes to see it and no heart to fear or exult in it?

Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the centre of everything. It seems so spectacular, so dignified and regal. They could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there, at the very centre of the waltzing universe, and they

As they orbit they might as well be intergalactic travellers chancing upon a virgin frontier. It seems uninhabited Captain, they say when they glance out before breakfast. We believe it could be the remnants of a collapsed civilisation. Prepare the thrusters for landing.

The thoughts run into a wall and expire. Then are reborn into a sudden apprehension, for the hundredth time today, of those four souls, his colleagues and friends, on their way to the moon. Take heart, his wife once said, if you perish up there the millions of bits of you will be orbiting the earth; that’s a good thought isn’t it? And smiled

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

And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.