ERIC KREBS
When an astronaut first enters orbit, they often turn around
and look back at the planet from whence they came, and something changes.
As declassified Soviet documents have since revealed,
humanity’s inaugural trip around the Earth was a precarious one. The morning of
April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was nervous. He had good reason to be. Gagarin was
well aware of the fact that half of all Soviet launches up to that point had
failed. A nurse reported him as pale, unsociable and quiet and was overall,
unlike himself. Waiting for liftoff, sealed inside the Vostok 1, he asked the
engineers to play some music over the radio.
At 9:18 a.m., Gagarin entered orbit above Siberia, 200 miles
above Siberia. The 27-year-old cosmonaut — the son of a carpenter and a dairy
farmer — was further from Earth than any human had ever been. He saw with his
own eyes something no human had ever seen before. “The Earth is surrounded by a
characteristic blue halo,” he recalled in a post-flight press conference. “This
halo is particularly visible at the horizon. From a light-blue coloring, the
sky blends into a beautiful deep blue, then dark blue, violet and finally
complete black.”
67 minutes went by and the S5.4 retrorocket — the part of
Gagarin’s capsule responsible for his return — activated. There was a problem:
the engine shut off one second early. The leftover fuel threw Gagarin’s ship
off balance, and he began to spin. The uncontrollable corps de ballet, as he
described it, prevented his capsule from separating properly, and created the
risk of burning up on reentry. Eventually, the modules separated, and Gagarin
deployed his parachute, 100 miles above the Mediterranean.
The happenstance of Gagarin’s flight, the threads by which
humanity’s first orbit into space avoided tragedy, the fragility of it all,
Michael Collins — the Apollo 11 astronaut who stayed in the Columbia while
Aldrin and Armstrong walked on the moon — found that fragility in space, as
well. Only, for Collins, the fragility didn’t belong to the computers, engines
or wires meant to get him and his crew mates back home to Earth. It was of the
Earth itself.
“The thing that really surprised me was that it projected an
air of fragility,” he told the New York Times earlier this year. “And why, I
don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny,
it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.” And while Collins was “the
loneliest man in the whole lonely history of this lonely planet,” while alone
floating 60 miles above the moon’s surface, when this feeling came to him, he
would not be alone in feeling so. The phenomenon became known as the “Overview
Effect,” the sense of euphoria, of bliss, of connectedness, of intense humanity
experienced by astronauts upon looking back at our pale blue dot amidst the
infinite, complete black of the universe around it.
The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges never saw Earth from
space. He couldn’t have. By the time Gargarin had made his first orbit, Borges
— who had lived a life of literature, of libraries, of the written word — was
blind. I don’t think he would have cared for it, anyway. Well into his
blindness, Borges would continue to write, to read and to inspire one college
junior to wax poetic long after his death. “Blindness is a gift,” he wrote in
an essay on the subject.
I imagine that had Borges entered orbit — and had he been
able to see beyond the red and black haze of his inherited blindness — that,
presented with the Earth, tiny and fragile against the universe, he would have
turned around. And, turned around, back to the world, he would have expected to
see something else, something bigger.
In his essay “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Borges examines
the novel, uncanny nature of the infinite series. He tells the story of chapter
six of Cervantes’ Quixote, in which the character of the barber peruses Don
Quixote’s library, only to find a copy of Cervantes’ Galatea. The barber notes
that he is a friend of the author, and yet he does not think highly of him,
exclaiming that “the book posses some inventiveness, proposes a few ideas and
concludes nothing.” In the second half of the Quixote, the characters
themselves reveal that they’ve read the first half of the novel (of which they
are the protagonists). Borges continues with an excerpt from American
philosopher Josiah Royce. Royce poses the case of a levelled-off section of
dirt in England upon which a perfectly detailed map of the country is
constructed; nothing is excluded. Thus, the map must contain “a map of the map,
which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.”
“Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the
map,” that “Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote,” Borges asks. What is the
uncanny feeling that arises from the notion that the letters you’re reading are
looking back at you? Borges suggests that our discomfort is with the feeling
that if a fictional character in a story can be a reader, then a spectator can
be a fictional character, too, that “the history of the universe is an infinite
sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which
they are also written.”
Few authors have made me feel more in college than Borges. I
learned to love his work last fall in a stuffy literature seminar in William
Harkness Hall. I was terrified by his obtuse prose, his encyclopaedic
references to classic literature (none of which I had read), and the seminar’s
ratio of PhD’s to me.
But something kept me there. His work is weird — really,
really weird. There are stories that take the form of encyclopedia entries,
stories that are book reviews of books that don’t exist, stories that blend the
Kabbalah with the detective novel, stories that imagine the world in the form
of an infinitely expanding, hexagonal library in which all of the universe is
written. In pushing the limits of literature, Borges tears at the edges of
thought, of what we consider fiction at all. In those pages, pouring over
infinite maps and Kaballistic detectives, I found myself in orbit. Sure, few
authors have ever made me feel more in college than Borges, but few things have
ever made me feel less at Yale than him — less at Yale, less in New Haven, less
in Connecticut, less in the United States, less in my own body, less caught up
in my own mind.
And thus, weightless amidst the pure joy of reading, of
deciphering, of not understanding — perhaps never understanding, I found a
childlike sense of wonder, the wonder of “What if?”
The wings that this place is supposed to provide are often
heavy, paralyzingly so. But there is no gravity in space. There is no gravity
in the map. There is no gravity in the absurd except for that which we allow
ourselves to feel. Dive into the unknown, the illegible, the incomprehensible.
After all, what if we are all written in some ancient book? What if Michael
Collins — alone in the Columbia, drifting in the deep quiet of space — had
looked past the fragile Earth and into the deep shadow of the universe?
He would have seen Borges himself, pen in hand, and a
college junior half a century away, taking notes.
Eric Krebs | eric.krebs@yale.edu.
Fuente: Yale Daily News
