In today’s newsletter, Merve Emre recommends books for celebrating friendship on Galentine’s Day. But, first, Dhruv Khullar on his recent trip to Mars, for this week’s 100th Anniversary Issue. Plus:
Dhruv KhullarKhullar is a physician and contributing writer.
In what’s being called “the second space age,” many observers have been focussing on the technological progress that appears to be transforming spaceflight into a commodity, but, as a doctor, I am fascinated by the question of what space travel does to the human body.
In a recent study sponsored by NASA, a team of researchers compared the astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station, with his identical twin, Mark Kelly, who stayed on Earth. The scientists identified some changes that you’d expect—in space, Scott’s muscles had atrophied, and he got two inches taller—but many of their findings were more unusual: his vision deteriorated; the bacteria in his gut shifted in composition; and the functioning of thousands of his genes had been altered. When Scott returned, markers of inflammation in his blood shot to levels that laboratory tests had trouble measuring, prompting one researcher to ask, “How did he survive?”
Only two dozen people—the Americans who crewed the Apollo missions—have ever exited Earth’s low orbit, and only for less than two weeks at a time. A mission to Mars, which both the U.S. and China are reportedly considering for the twenty-thirties, could last years. For my piece in this week’s Anniversary Issue, I travelled to a remote part of Utah to visit the Mars Desert Research Station, a facility that offers a rough approximation of life on the Red Planet, complete with space suits, air locks, rovers, and a two-story cylindrical habitat. It was one of the strangest places I have ever visited—and, yet, it was also infinitely more familiar than anything that the first humans on Mars will experience. “I simply don’t think we can extrapolate from shorter missions to longer missions,” a researcher told me. “These are biological systems. At some point, they may just run out of the ability to compensate.”
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Merve EmreEmre is a literary critic and has been writing for The New Yorker since 2020.
Speaking truthfully, I had never heard of Galentine’s Day before I was asked to write for this newsletter. But I am intrigued by the idea of Saint Galentine, patron saint of unromantic love. In my mind, she has a reckless laugh and a withering eye and beautiful, tangled hair. She is dressed in all the nice clothes I’ve taken from my friends. In a cavernous, Poppins-esque bag, she carries Margaret Cavendish’s “The Blazing World,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Inseparables,” Sigrid Nunez’s “What Are You Going Through,” and these three books.
“The Lying Life of Adults”: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet would have been the obvious choice, but I have a deeper affinity for her subsequent novel, about the fourteen-year-old Giovanna. Amid a “confusion of suffering” is Giovanna’s quiet and steady friendship with Ida, a writer. Together they run away from home, to seek a better way of being an adult than those who surround them. The novel hints that it is Ida who faithfully writes down Giovanna’s story, bringing clarity and a sense of purpose to her life when no one else can—the definition of true friendship.
“I Am the Brother of XX”: In Fleur Jaeggy’s collection of prose, there are two pieces about the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. One of them, written shortly after Bachmann’s death, recalls her friend’s precise and queenly bearing. “I was always struck by her ineluctable delicacy of spirit,” Jaeggy writes, “in her way of approaching others, especially friends.” How Jaeggy chooses to remember Bachmann, and what she refuses to reveal about her friend, mirrors this delicacy.
“To the Lighthouse”: “Love had a thousand shapes,” Virginia Woolf writes in her 1927 novel, her masterpiece about the Ramsay family. Love’s most evocative shape is the outline of two figures—of the frustrated painter Lily Briscoe, who sits on the floor with her arms around Mrs. Ramsay’s knees. “It was not knowledge but unity that she desired,” Woolf explains, “not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.” This motionless, radiant intimacy between women presents a way of coming to know one another over and above language.
P.S. A trip to Mars might be harder on astronauts’ minds than on their bodies. “Staring into the night for eight monotonous months, how would they keep their focus?” Tom Kizzia asked, in a piece about the emotional dynamics among space companions during long-distance travel. “How would they avoid rancor or debilitating melancholy?” 🚀
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.
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