© astronaut William Anders | Earthrise, 24.12.1968

The pilot of the lunar module, William Anders, using a specially adapted Hasselblad camera, photographed a two-thirds-full Earth soaring in a night sky. His picture show it in luscious colour, with feathery cloud cover, swirling storm systems, rich blue seas and rusty continents. Major General Anders later reflected:

 "I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus … We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we’d come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at."

At the time, Anders's photos were disturbing as they were beautiful: and they remain so today.

Julian Barnes, in Levels of Life

do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash?

© Claude Nori

You put two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen ballon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possiblle; but it is emotionally possible.

Julian Barnes, in Levels of life

© Jillian Edelstein | Julian Barnes e Pat Kavanagh

“Juntam-se duas coisas que nunca se tinham juntado antes. E o mundo muda…”

Julian Barnes