One world

Anyone who has had occasion to use crutches temporarily will have observed an extraordinary side-effect; as soon as you start walking with them, the world seems full of other people on crutches.  It is as if there were some secret community who emerge only when there are others of their clan around.  In a similar way, pregnancy seems to be some kind of instantly infectious disease.  Once a woman has caught it, she seems suddenly to be surrounded by hundreds of others in various stages of swelling, as if they had sprung up overnight like mushrooms.

It is all a question of perspective, of course.  Before the intimate encounter with crutches or pregnancy, we were simply blind or indifferent to the occurrences of both.  Sensitised by our personal experiences, we gain a new awareness of what is around us, see things with new eyes, and discover a new commonality with other people.

Some years back, I had another of these small but revelatory encounters which has changed the way I look at the world not just metaphorically, but quite literally too.

I was looking for a photograph of the earth.  Nothing fancy: I simply wanted a cliched shot of a great blue globe with a few continents visible.  After contacting a few photographic libraries, I soon found what I was after.  It is a view from below the equator, and showed a huge swirling mass of snow-bright cloud over Antarctica, with great whorls spinning away from it.  Most of Africa could be seen, a great dusky triangle cutting into the intense blue of the oceans.  The earth itself seemed a perfect, hard sphere, the most intricate and precious marble ever made. 

At the time, I thought no more about it. But then something strange began to happen.  I started noticing this particular shot of the earth - my shot - all over the place. Every advertisement seemed to have it, every magazine article dealing with the world would use it.  At first I put this down to coincidence, until finally I understood: I continued to see this one particular shot of our tiny globe because it was the only one.

It is obvious, really.  To take such a photograph you need to be tens of thousands of miles out in space. And the only occasions when astronauts have been so far from home is during the expeditions to the moon.  Taking photographs of the earth was not a priority, so we have relatively few of them.  And of those few, the one I - and everyone else - used was clearly the most photogenic, the most striking and moving. 

In fact it is more moving than I originally thought.  As I subsequently discovered, this shot was taken by one Harrison H Schmitt, in December 1972, during the Apollo 17 mission.  It was taken from a distance of 23,000 miles.  Apollo 17 was the last journey to the moon, and so this photograph, with its uniquely poignant sense of how small and insignificant our earth is on the galactic scale, how the seemingly infinite diversity of life is held in such a bounded space, probably represents the last human glance so far that we have had of ourselves in this way, the last image of our earth and our peoples as One World.

(25.1.92)

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