In Light-Years There's No Hurry

April 15, 2023
An escape from doomscrolling social media to the vantage point of the Hubble telescope, 340 miles above the Earth's surface. Following three books of poetry and a novel, Amsterdam-based space reporter van Heemstra invites readers to take a breath, forgo the breakneck pace and seeming futility of modern life, and take a view of our lives from the point of view of an astronaut in orbit. As the author points out, the daily inundation of emails, bills, social media, and negative news coverage has increasingly limited her view to "the chaos occurring at eye level." She continues, "I want to shrink, zoom out, find an overview from which I can see things, myself, others, in their proper proportion." This hyperengagement also counterintuitively hampers any attempt to make meaningful progress, and van Heemstra takes inspiration from the astronauts who, after witnessing the world as a proverbial blue marble, return to rededicate their efforts to the well-being of the planet, whether continuing their scientific studies fighting climate change or advocating for social injustice. This cognitive shift, coined by author Frank White as the "overview effect," occurs when one is able to break away from the constant barrage of mundane life, and the resulting feeling is one of cosmological connectedness. Throughout this brief yet paradigm-shifting book, the author guides readers through poignant vignettes and interviews with leading thinkers in the science of space. In the course of her journey, she seeks to "mentally remove myself from Earth," an exceedingly difficult task. Each investigation into the minutiae of space brings a subtle suggestion of the interconnectedness of all things, and by the conclusion, readers will start to believe it is possible to attain a whole worldview between the covers of a book. A striking text that takes us beyond our planet for a fresh perspective.

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April 10, 2023
Poet and journalist van Heemstra (In Search of a Name) brings cosmology down to earth in this delightful take on enlarging one’s perspective. On a hot summer night in 2019, a sleepless and existentially anxious van Heemstra was doomscrolling through her phone when a picture taken by the Hubble Telescope popped into her feed and seized her imagination as “the most beautiful vista I know.” This moment kickstarted her quest to understand what she came to know as “the overview effect,” or the transcendent shift in perspective of astronauts after they’ve looked down at Earth. With a poet’s eye and a scientist’s empirical persistence, van Heemstra interviewed astrophysicists, engineers, and even a theologian who helped her understand “the profound awareness that we live in a, statistically speaking, negligible planet in an unfathomable universe.” Meanwhile, the author’s daily life continued, and she attempted to see interactions with her partner, children, and neighbors from a new vantage point, concluding that space “is not above us. The universe surrounds us, is within us,” and that cosmic vastness can shed light on social divisiveness, because “if we take a step back, we see how amazing it is that we even exist at all to have these disagreements.” The author’s curious, investigative spirit and lyrical prose enchants. Fans of Rebecca Solnit will love this.