麻豆社

Good Morning,

You need to get out more, someone said to me recently. Which, even though I was being grumpy, seemed unfair, under the circumstances.

Then, just as we are making plans to get away somewhere 鈥� anywhere! - having adjusted our expectations for travel, I see there is a man flying a rocket into space where there are no known restrictions on movement and uncertain regulations around Covid protocols. It doesn鈥檛 help that he is the richest man in the known universe.

Jeff Bezos, retired founder of Amazon, has just flown, hot in the recently blazed trail of Richard Branson, in a suborbital rocket ride. He took with him the oldest woman astronaut, his brother and a young Dutchman. With the stated aim of 鈥渕aking space more accessible to all.鈥�

He鈥檚 done it on the anniversary of Neil Armstrong鈥檚 moon landing. An event that, like Bezos, I watched when I was five, pushing the boundaries of staying up late. And changing my preferred career from zookeeper to astronaut overnight. Why then am I struggling to cheer or even watch? Thinking instead of TS Eliot鈥檚 lines: 鈥楾hey all go into the dark, the vacant interstellar spaces. The vacant into the vacant.鈥�

It could be that I need to get out more; it could just be this heat. It might just be the sound of banging and drilling going on in my street, as people quest for more space, extending out, digging down, lofting up.

Then again, it feels - what with the financial struggles of millions, the massive carbon emissions involved, the tough working conditions of many of the people who helped put this man into orbit, and the reality that only a few galactically rich people will be able to afford future space tourism - that the timing of this is, as my aunt used to say, a bit off.

Bezos observed before the flight that everyone who has been to space is changed when they realise how fragile the earth is. 鈥業 don鈥檛 know how it will change me鈥�, he said 鈥榖ut I know it鈥檚 going to.鈥� There is something of The Little Prince in this, in which St. Exupery wrote: 鈥楴o-one is ever satisfied where he is; only children know what they are looking for.鈥�

The urge to quest, to boldly go, to infinity and beyond, seems perfectly human, God given even. But what are we really looking for? The book of Ecclesiastes says, 鈥楪od plants eternity in the human heart.鈥� This suggests to me that we don鈥檛 have to travel far to find eternal things, they鈥檙e already here. We don鈥檛 have to be rich or head to the stars to experience this. For something of infinite depth and height and breath has already come to us.

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