Why Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard is a mountain of a book

…and why you must scale it, at least once in your life.

The Snow Leopard was lying on my bookshelf for more than five years before I picked it up. In those five years, it beckoned me often. But somehow, the silent pull wasn’t strong enough for me to make a physical move.

Until now. Beset by a strong desire to go visit the mountains, especially the Himalayas, but unable to do so for multiple reasons, I possibly did the next best thing: Picked up the book and traveled with its author, Peter Matthiessen, on a mystical journey of self-discovery to the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan Plateau, near the border with Nepal.

When I was almost finished reading, a combined sense of fulfillment, dread, sadness, and joy took hold of me. Sadness at the knowledge that a wondrous journey was coming to an end; joy at the treasure chest of beauty and wisdom Matthiessen opened up, scattering its pearls all along the way, for countless readers like me.

The author undertook this journey along with the field biologist George Schaller in the 1970s, walking hundreds of mountainous miles for a little over two months. They wanted to study bharal, the wild blue sheep-goat of the region, with a faint chance at being among the lucky few to spot the amazing, revered cat, the snow leopard.

The book, The Snow Leopard, at first appears to be a diary-like account of that journey (date-wise entries of varying lengths double as chapters within sections). It is that but, thankfully, much more.

I’m in agreement with this blurb taken from a review by Jim Harrison for The Nation: “A magical book: a kind of lunar paradigm and map of the sacred…The book has transcended the usual limits of language.”

The Snow Leopard is indeed transcendental, and not just on account of language. It is a timeless travel classic that can very well serve as a spiritual refuge in times of distress and doubt.

Besides Schaller, Matthiessen is accompanied by a curious mix of porters (Sherpas and Tamangs) to help with their load, cooking, and other routine tasks. Throughout the journey, he portrays these characters in witty detail and draws your attention to the rich variety of life ever-present in nature in a way that makes you feel as if you are right there, witnessing all this firsthand. His writing is not grandiose or lavish but simple, natural, endearing.

The most important bits, if you ask me, are his inner detours in which he talks about the workings of Buddhism’s various streams, the revered figures like Milarepa and Avalokiteshwara, what it means to seek one’s place in the universe, and what truly gives us peace and happiness. Profound as these things are supposed to be, Matthiessen makes them come alive and within easy reach as he melds his noble thoughts effortlessly with the daily ‘step and stave’ of walking on snowy, alpine paths, and surviving with barebone necessities in the company of strangers that seem to be living in another century yet whose simple acceptance of life and its harsh ways are so disarming, so uplifting at times.

Among the most charming, intriguing parts I found are the ones where Matthiessen describes Tukten, the enigmatic sherpa, and his equally enigmatic relationship with him throughout the journey (and possibly beyond it in another life).

Take this early passage, for instance: “Tukten has elf's ears and a thin neck, a yellow face, and the wild wise eyes of a naljorpa, or Tibetan yogi. He radiates that inner quiet which is often associated with spiritual attainment, but perhaps his attainment is a dark one. The other Sherpas are uneasy with him; they mutter that he drinks too much, uses foul language, is not to be trusted…This disreputable fellow is somehow known to me, like a dim figure from another life.”

Despite his “reputation,” Tukten exerts an extraordinary influence on Matthiessen—without actually doing any exertion. For he is an effortless, easygoing being who seems unperturbed in the most trying of circumstances.

Toward the end, when Matthiessen is parting ways with Tukten, shaking his hand and watching him go in the cab, he draws parallels between the sherpa and himself: “Without ever attempting to speak about it, we perceive life in the same way, or rather, I perceive it in the way that Tukten lives it. In his life in the moment, in his freedom from attachments, in the simplicity of his everyday example, Tukten has taught me over and over, he is the teacher that I hoped to find…”

There appears to be a fine, mystic example at one place in the book of how some Tibetans “live” what most ordinary folk merely “perceive.” It occurs when the traveling party needs to pass a narrow stretch of cliff about a hundred feet above rocks at the edge of a lake. Matthiessen, who has been walking ahead, pauses at this point, leaning into the cliff to let the nine porters in his entourage pass by. What he witnesses next is nothing short of surreal:

“At that dangerous point of cliff, an extraordinary thing happens. Not yet in view, the nine fall silent [the porters were chattering before that] in the sudden way that birds are stilled by the shadow of a hawk, or tree frogs cease their shrilling, leaving a ringing silence in the silence. Then, one by one, the nine figures round the point of rock in silhouette, unreal beneath big bulky loads that threaten each second to bump the cliff and nudge them over the precipice. On they come, staring straight ahead, as steadily and certainly as ants, yet seeming to glide with an easy, ethereal lightness, as if some sort of inner concentration was lifting them just off the surface of the ground. Bent far forward against the tump lines around their foreheads, fingers wide spread by way of balance, they touch the cliff face lightly to the left side, stroke the north wind to the right. Light finger-tips touch my upper leg, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine hands, but the intensity is such that they seem not to distinguish between cold rock face and warm blue jeans. Mute unknowing, dull eyes glazed, the figures brush past one by one in their wool boots and sashed tunics, leaving behind in the clear air the smell of grease and fires. When the bad stretch is past, the hooting instantly resumes, perhaps at the point where they left off, as if all had awakened from a trance.”

I read the above passage a couple of times, as if in a trance myself.

Later on, Matthiessen wonders about the incredible incident, thinking it to be a form of lung-gom, a Tantric discipline that permits the adept to glide along with uncanny swiftness and certainty, even at night. He also compares it to the yogic concept of prana: lung-gom literally means wind-concentration and prana is the vital energy or breath that permeates everything.

There are several passages in the book where Matthiessen shines a light on meditation—both by dwelling on Tibetan-Buddhist teachings and by his own sincere attempts at its practice.

What I really liked is the author’s openness in not restricting his writing to any one particular sect but embracing multiple streams and cultures. So, even as he is talking about Tibetan yogi Milarepa’s teachings, he doesn’t shy away from dwelling on meditative experiences as varied as those of bushmen and dervishes. Consider the following excerpts:

“Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one's own folly, or even of one's navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every   culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, Eskimo using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhi state of sitting yoga. In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal…

“Like the round-bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its centre, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this "void", this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one's own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as "great death". This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks.”

In November 1971, before Matthiessen started his Crystal Mountain journey, he and his wife (her name is Deborah but he affectionately refers to her as D), who was suffering from cancer, attended a Zen meditation retreat in New York. In one of the meditative sessions, they both happened to sit opposite each other. Just the night before, Matthiessen had quietly perceived his wife to be dying and on that morning when they both meditated, his heart was full of compassion. He chanted the Kannon Sutra, which is dedicated to the Bodhisattva of Compassion who is known by several names, including Kanzeon, Guanyin, Avalokiteshwara and, of course, Kannon (an aside: the popular Japanese company Cannon derives its name from it.)

Matthiessen recalls, with incredible grace, what happened in that deeply-moving session during his Himalayan journey:

“Before dawn on Sunday, during morning service, D chanced upon to sit directly opposite my own place in the two long facing lines of Buddha figures—an unlikely event that I now see as no coincidence. Upset by what I had perceived the night before, by pity and concern that this day might be too much for her, I chanted the Kannon Sutra with such fury that I “lost” myself, forgot the self—a purpose of the sutra, which is chanted in Japanese, over and over, with mounting intensity. At the end, the Sangha gives a mighty shout that corresponds to OM!—this followed instantly by sudden silence, as if the universe had stopped to listen. And on that morning, in the near darkness—the altar candle was the only light in the long room—in the dead hush, like the hush in these snow mountains, the silence swelled with the intake of my breath into a Presence of vast benevolence of which I was a part: in my journal for that day, seeking in vain to find words for what had happened, I called it the “Smile”. The Smile seemed to grow out of me, filling all space above and behind like a huge shadow of my own Buddha form, which was minuscule now without weight, borne up on the upraised palm of this Buddha-Being, this eternal amplification of myself. For it was I who had smiled; the Smile was Me. I did not breathe, I did not need to look; for It was Everywhere. Nor was there terror in my awe: I felt “good”, like a “good child”, entirely safe. Wounds, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart lay at the heart of Creation. Then I let my breath go, and gave myself up to delighted immersion in this Presence, to a peaceful belonging so overwhelming that tears of relief poured from my eyes, so overwhelming that even now, struggling to find a better term than “Smile” or “Presence”, the memory affects me as I write. For the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone; there was no separate “I”.”

Peter Matthiessen died in November 2014, a little over a year after I started my own meditation practice. My only “interaction with him” has been through reading The Snow Leopard—and yet, I can see some of my own experiences reflected in the crystalline waters of many of its passages. How gladly I would have treated him “as my own Tukten” were we to meet somehow!

When Matthiessen describes nature and the birds and the streams and his own presence in their midst, he does so with an effortless mastery over words, stringing them together in a beautiful, fragrant garland:

“The ground whirls with its own energy, not in an alarming way but in slow spiral, and at these altitudes, in this vast space and silence, that energy pours through me, joining my body with the sun until small silver breaths of cold, clear air, no longer mine, are lost in the mineral breathing of the mountain. A white down feather, sun-filled, dances before me on the wind: alighting nowhere, it balances on a shining thorn, goes spinning on. Between this white feather, sheep dung, light, and the fleeting aggregate of atoms that is "I," there is no particle of difference. There is a mountain opposite, but this "I" is opposite nothing, opposed to nothing.

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the rough-hewn Tartars in their braids and homespun boots, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do. We have had no news of modern times since late September and will have none until December, and gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely: I am returned into myself.”

Matthiessen’s is one of the few books I’m sure to return to more than once—one of the few, too, I cannot recommend highly enough. There’s so much more I wanted to excerpt from the book, but I must pause now and content myself with what follows (and no, there’s no conclusion to this; only continuity):

“Near my lookout, I find a place to meditate, out of the wind, a hollow on the ridge where snow has melted. My brain soon clears in the cold mountain air, and I feel better. Wind, blowing grasses, sun: the dying grass, the notes of southbound birds in the mountain sky are no more fleeting than the rock itself, no more so and no less—all is the same. The mountain withdraws into its stillness, my body dissolves into the sunlight, tears fall that have nothing to do with “I”. What it is that brings them on, I do not know.

In other days, I understood mountains differently, seeing in them something that abides. Even when approached respectfully (to challenge peaks as mountaineers do is another matter) they appalled me with their "permanence", with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.

My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the centre of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as "the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.'' The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is "to paint eyeballs on chaos". When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present—even while I think of it—is gone.”

Before I bid adieu, just one more thing, which rings like a divine chant throughout the book: Om Mani Padme Hum (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus.)

Namaskar! Thank you for reading :)

There is something special about chai

There’s something about chai that no other beverage offers by way of sukoon—just as there’s no word, other than sukoon, that describes the supreme feeling of contentment it induces in those who take a deep, soulful sip.

Chai (called tea in English with not exactly the same flavor) is like a divine gift for its hundreds of millions of lovers around the world.

Global it may be, but chai has a special connection with four countries: India, China, Japan, and England.

Legend has it that Bodhidharma, the renowned 5th century monk who taught at the Shaolin monastery in China, once took it upon himself to meditate for a long time. But he fell asleep before his avowed period of meditation could end. When he woke up, he was so enraged that he cut off his eyelids in repentance and threw them to the ground.

Tea leaves grew for the first time at the very spot where the monk’s eyelids fell.

And from then on, tea is said to have become the favorite drink of monks who wanted to stay awake in their meditation practice.

Another Chinese legend attributes the origin of tea drinking to the mythical emperor Shen-Nung (also called Shennong or the Divine Farmer)—several centuries before the Christian era. It says that he discovered the medicinal properties of tea when some leaves from a wild plant accidentally fell into his pot of boiling water.

It was not until the Tang dynasty (618-907), however, that tea consumption became widespread in China. It was also during the Tang dynasty that Lu Yu wrote one of the first authoritative books on this subject, The Classic of Tea.

Japan, too, saw the introduction and spread of tea drinking through monks. In the Heian period (794-1185), Saicho and Kukai were among the first to bring tea seeds to be planted in Nippon—though it is the Zen monk Eisai who is credited with popularizing the drink in the late 12th century. Eisai also wrote a book, Record of Drinking Tea on Health, whose Japanese title, if you ask me, has a cute Hindi ring to it: Kissa Yojoki.

By the 15th century, the tea ceremony in Japan had evolved into a highly refined art form, reaching its pinnacle under tea master Rikyu a little later. Chanyou, the Japanese “Way of Tea”, has four key principles to the whole regimen of serving and drinking tea: Wa (harmony), Kei (respect), Sei (purity), and Jaku (tranquility). Applied together, they guide you to a more balanced and mindful way of celebrating tea.

The term “Teaism” was coined by the Japanese scholar and art critic Okakura Kakuzo to describe the unique worldview associated with the Japanese way of tea, going beyond the presentation aspects that Westerners usually focus on.

In his celebrated classic, The Book of Tea, first published in 1906, Kakuzo writes:

“The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Lao-tse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.”

Beautiful words that evoke the serene, profound imagery that nothing but tea can encompass in its majestic sweep of history.

There are not-so-elegant aspects of history associated with tea as well, to put it mildly. In Europe, tea consumption remained confined to the elite after Dutch and Portuguese traders first brought it to the continent in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Soon after, the British East India Company established a monopoly on the tea trade from China. When taxes were reduced to make tea more accessible, its popularity exploded, requiring huge imports from China to satisfy demand.

But massive imports of tea [besides porcelain and silk] from China caused a silver deficit, prompting Britain to smuggle opium from India to China (When the Chinese tried to stop it, this led to the Opium Wars.)

To reduce over-reliance on China for their tea, the British went about setting up tea plantations in the Indian states of Assam and Darjeeling (the first one was set up in 1837 at Chabua in Upper Assam). The first few chests of Assam tea arrived in London from India in 1839; by 1888, the British imported more tea from India than from China. By the turn of the century, Chinese tea imports were just a pale shadow.

As for its consumption in India, tea was initially shunned by the people. This was partly because of the crushing, sub-human conditions under which the indentured laborers used by the British colonists worked, and partly because of tea’s high price. Besides, the majority of Indians had never tasted the beverage. After the Great Depression brought down the prices and created a surplus of tea waiting to be exported from India, however, the British rulers turned their attention to the market within India. They undertook what’s arguably the largest marketing campaign in Indian history, using hundreds of “tea propagandists” and “tea vans” that dispensed millions of free cups of tea to anyone who was interested in tasting it.

The marketing tactics used in the campaign were later duplicated and built upon by private companies, including Brooke Bond and Lipton. But it would take several decades of concerted, persistent effort to make the foreign tea into local chai, the unofficial national drink of India.

As of today, the sound of “chai-chai-chai” forms the ubiquitous buzz at thousands of bus and train stations across India. The banter and gossip of the milling workers, laborers, and good-for-nothings over chai at countless tapris and tea joints mingles effortlessly with the silent march of a nation perpetually suspended in motion.

I think that’s more history than our brains can handle at a given time!

So let’s get back to chai and sukoon.

The Japanese ceremony is marked by elaborate rituals, the art of arranging flowers, attention to details regarding the utensils, and the performative steps for serving, drinking, and washing up.

But for me and, I suspect, millions of Indian chai-lovers like me, it’s fairly simple and straightforward.

Boil some tea leaves in water. Add milk and sugar to taste. (A hint of ginger for ginger tea aficionados would be great!) Serve with an ear-to-ear grin and unmistakable warmth.

Within minutes, the server and the served are co-travelers to a land where worries dissolve in the vapor-mist wafting from the cups. Where stories are shared with loving memories or unrestrained laughter. Where you can nod your head with understanding or shake it in disbelief with equal ease.

Be it the scorching summer of mid-year, the freezing cold of December-January, or the redeeming drizzle in between, if you have chai at hand and someone to share it with, there’s nothing much else to ask for.

Bun-maska or biscuits, perhaps. But that’s about it.

To borrow a line from Chaayos, “Wo sukoon se jeete hain jo chai peete hain.”

Yes, there's nothing quite like chai.

Why The Hitchhiker’s Guide continues to make you laugh after all these years

 

There’s science fiction and there’s science fiction. 

 

And then there’s the adorable, zany, laugh-out-loud fictional world created by Douglas Adams.

 

I recently re-read the late author’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—after more than 30 years. Not only did I find it fresh as ever, I liked it even more this time around. You can say I’ve grown up—or maybe down—a bit, I don’t know.

 

What I know for sure is that the crazy characters conjured up by Adams immediately cast their spell on you and wouldn’t let go without tickling you senseless. Merely reading the wacky names can send ripples of laughter down your spine.

 

Let’s try out a few:

 

Zaphod Beeblebrox.

 

Slartibartfast.

 

Vroomfondel.

 

Lunkwill and Fook.

 

Oh my dog, what a book!

 

I do not intend to make this post into a book review—there must be gazillions of them out there already.

 

What I’m doing here, instead, is picking out some of the most delicious excerpts and serving them up for your linguistic taste buds.

 

Now, this Zaphod guy is the President of the Galactic Government. Adams describes him as “roughly humanoid except for the extra head and third arm.” There’s a scene in which he is addressing a press conference to unveil a new starship. One particularly comic sentence about Zaphod’s peculiar body stands out:

 

“The robot camera homed in for a close-up on the more popular of his two heads and he waved again.” 

 

The more popular of his two heads…hahaha!

 

The Vogons from the planet Vogsphere depicted in the book are a weird lot. This passage about Vogon and other galactic poetry will have you in splits:

 

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.

 

In case you are wondering about the worst poetry, Adams conferred that honor on a human:

 

The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth. 

 

At one point, the protagonist of the book, Arthur Dent, is talking with Ford Prefect, his co-traveler from another planet, just before the duo is about to be thrown out from a Vogon spacecraft:

 

"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

 

"Why, what did she tell you?"

 

"I don't know, I didn't listen.”

 

As you can see, Douglas Adams’s ability to create humor out of thin air is nothing less than stellar—pun intended.

 

And it’s not all mindless humor (though you wouldn’t mind it for the fun element): Adams sometimes takes digs at issues afflicting earthlings in the real world. Sample the satire about over-tourism spoiling the environment:

 

The introduction [to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] begins like this:

 

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..." and so on.

 

(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt.)

 

Brilliantly imagined satire, isn’t it?

 

This one is an absolute favorite of mine. The scene is that Slartibartfast, a designer of planets, is met by Arthur Dent at a crater on the surface of Magrathea (where new planets are made on demand). A robot by the name of Marvin is also with Arthur but it is a bit far and Slartibartfast is not sure if the two of them are together.

 

He [Slartibartfast] pointed down into the crater.

 

"Is that robot yours?" he said.

 

"No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater, "I'm mine."

 

Imagine a robot saying: “I’m mine”!

 

(For all you know, ChatGPT might soon disown being owned by Sam Altman or OpenAI!)

 

In the same scene, old Slartibartfast, too, delivers a snarky punch that will make you chuckle with delight.

 

“Come,” called the old man, “come now or you will be late.”

 

"Late?" said Arthur. "What for?"

 

"What is your name, human?"

 

"Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur.

 

"Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly. 

 

Besides the humor, you also marvel at how Adams describes certain things in his own unique way. The concept of bigness and infinity, for instance.

 

"I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too ... large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you."

 

Arthur made nervous noises.

 

Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly, "It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight." The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

 

It wasn't infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.

 

And here’s the last one for this post—another gem from Marvin, the robot aptly described as an “electronic sulking machine”:

 

Ford stayed, and went to examine the Blagulon ship. As he walked, he nearly tripped over an inert steel figure lying face down in the cold dust.

 

"Marvin!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing?"

 

"Don't feel you have to take any notice of me, please," came a muffled drone.

 

"But how are you, metalman?" said Ford.

 

"Very depressed."

 

"What's up?"

 

"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."

 

I didn’t get this one on first reading, but then it dawned on me and I couldn’t help but smile.

 

That’s it for now, fellow earthlings. Do keep smiling and laughing.

 

Thank you for reading!

 

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital offers a beautiful window into the mind of an astronaut

 

At a time when Indians are celebrating the return to earth of Sunita Williams, my mind is still afloat with the thoughts of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
 
Don’t get me wrong: the space station I’m talking of is from Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker prize-winning novel.
 
And what an amazing book it is!
 
Like millions of Indians, I’ve enjoyed Williams’s videos of her extended stay on the ISS. But after reading Orbital, I can happily say that I’m “witness” to much more.
 
First and foremost, the wondrous, all-too-human thoughts of Anton, Pietro, Roman, Shaun, Chie, and Nell—whom Harvey has compared to the spaceship’s heart, mind, hands, soul, conscience, and breath.
 
But embodying what goes on in their minds and hearts, I suspect, is the author’s own voice. A voice so beautiful and enchanting that the Guardian called Orbital “an uplifting book, in every sense.” 
 
When I started reading the book, I picked up a pen to mark a few lines or paras I particularly liked. By the time I finished it, however, the markings engulfed much of this tiny treasure (it’s less than 140 pages but its scope and imagination are vast).
 
The best parts I liked concern the sheer beauty and uniqueness (thus far!) of the pale blue dot we call Planet Earth—our only home in a seemingly endless universe, not counting the astronauts’ occasional sojourns outside. And I completely second the spacefolk’s thoughts, echoed so poignantly by Harvey in her book, about how the humans’ non-Sapiens behavior is ruining it beyond repair.
 
When the astronauts arrive on the spaceship, the lights of the “night earth” impress them most. As Harvey writes: “From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone…The night’s electric excess takes their breath.”
 
After a week or two of “city awe,” however, the astronauts’ senses begin to broaden and deepen and it’s “daytime earth” they come to love, the author notes. 
 
With the space station orbiting the earth at over 17,000 miles an hour, there’s a new daybreak for them every ninety minutes. And the kaleidoscopic play of night and day casts a mesmeric spell on how they observe the earth.
 
“It’s the humanless simplicity of land and sea. The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself. It’s the planet’s indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language. It’s the black hole of the Pacific becoming field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges; then the spindle of Central America which drops away beneath them now to bring to view the Bahamas and Florida and the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean Plate. It’s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds. It’s the diagonal beating path of the galaxy, an invitation to the shunning void.”
 
The love for a shifting, turning, breathing earth is also accompanied by the realization of how human choices and politics have wreaked havoc.
 
“Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush…or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed meter by painstaking meter and turned into land to house more and more people…or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses whose plastic makes the entire southern tip of Spain white in the sun.”
 
When they look upon the earth, Harvey writes, the astronauts come to see the politics of want, of growing and getting—a “billion extrapolations of the urge for more.”
 
Inside the spacecraft, the astronauts go about their duties with mechanical precision—often marveling at the meaning of it all. They tend to mice and plants brought along for scientific experiments, do the chores of maintaining the ship, and engage in small talk like most people would do back here on earth.
 
On occasion, Harvey skillfully melds sensitive moments with the critical realities of living in the extraordinary environment of a spaceship. For instance, when Chie shares a memory of climbing a mountain with her mother (who recently expired in Japan while Chie is here on the station), Anton finds himself crying. His tears form four droplets which float away from his eyes—which he and Chie “catch in the palms of their hands.”
 
Liquids are not to be let loose on a spacecraft.
 
Harvey narrates the life and challenges of astronauts in a way that stays with you long after you have read her words.
 
“Up here in microgravity you’re a seabird on a warm day drifting, just drifting. What use are biceps, calves, strong shin bones; what use muscle mass? Legs are a thing of the past. But every day the six of them have to fight this urge to dissipate. They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run eight miles inside a slick metal module with a close-up view of a turning planet.
 
Sometimes they wish for a cold stiff wind, blustery rain, autumn leaves, reddened fingers, muddy legs, a curious dog, a startled rabbit, a leaping sudden deer, a puddle in a pothole, soaked feet, a slight chill, a fellow runner, a shaft of sun.”
 
One of the astronauts, Shaun, once receives an editorial email asking his views about an imminent moon landing. The question posed is this: With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?
 
While Shaun answers the email in the customary and predictable way (“There’s perhaps never been so exciting and pivotal a time…”), he turns the question to his fellow-traveler, Pietro. The answer Pietro gives is more pointed (and perhaps apt, given our current situation): “With the gilded pens of billionaires, I guess.”
 
The gilded pens of billionaires indeed seem to be writing our future in space, perhaps without as much thought as should have gone into it. And often in a “tearing” hurry.
 
Which is why we must take a pause and go with Harvey on a considerate “Orbital trip”. The book doesn’t have all the answers—but at least it compels us to ask some questions that urgently need to be asked.