“I found out something about astronauts the other day that surprised me. It turns out all these melancholy songs are wrong. There wasn’t time in space to contemplate the tropic of Capricorn or dictate love letters to your wife. NASA was careful to schedule every minute of an astronaut’s time, filling it up with endless tasks and experiments. Some of this was important, but some of it was just busywork, designed to keep them from thinking about being hundreds of thousands of miles from home. The theory was that astronauts should never find themselves in space with time on their hands, that it was safer this way. Because otherwise they might truly see the Earth floating beneath them. Because otherwise they might realize where they were and what they’d done.”

Jenny Offill, Songs About Space, http://jennyoffill.com/essays/