Helga Davis

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Radiolab.

From WNYC.

At first, they're drawn to the views at night, the gorgeous encrusting of city lights and the surface dazzle of man-made things.

There's something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries,

Almost every mile of Europe's coastline is inhabited, and the whole continent outlined with fine precision the city's constellations joined by the golden thread of roads.

Those same golden threads track across the Alps, usually grayish blue with snowfall.

At night, they can point to home.

There's Seattle, Osaka, London, Bologna, St.

Petersburg, and Moscow.

Moscow, one enormous point of light like the pole star in a shrill, clear sky.

The night's electric excess takes their breath, the spread of life, the way the planet proclaims to the abyss.

There is something and someone here, and how for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails.

Since even at night, there's only one man-made border in the whole of the world.

A long trail of lights between Pakistan and India.

That's all civilization has to show for its divisions.

And by day, even that is gone.

Soon, things change.

After a week or so of city awe, the senses begin to broaden and deepen, and it's the daytime Earth they come to love.

It's the human-less 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 in the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language.

It's the black hole of the Pacific becoming a 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, Uzbekistan, in an expanse of ochre and brown.

The snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan,

The clean, brilliant Indian ocean of blues untold, the apricot desert of Taklamakan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds.

It's the diagonal beating path of the galaxy, an invitation into the shunning void.

So then come discrepancies and gaps.

They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance.

They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth.

You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders, except those between land and sea.

You'll see no countries, just a rolling, indivisible globe, which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war.

And you'll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once.

Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair.

Because of course you know that war abounds, and that borders are something that people will kill and die for.

While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range, and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that's where it ends.

There's no wall or barrier.

No tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear.

Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold.

It's the desire, no, the need, fueled by fervor to protect this huge yet tiny earth.

This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness.

This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home.

An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright.

Can humans not find peace with one another?

With the Earth?

It's not a fond wish, but a fretful demand.

Can we not stop tyrannizing and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

Yet they hear the news and they've lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive.

So what do they do?

What action to take?

And what use are words?

They're humans with a godly view, and that's the blessing and also the curse.