Elsewhere
In Search of Lost Attention
Part One — The View from Out Here
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression. Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
— Sylvia Plath
Chapter One: In Search of God
On 12 April 1961, 27-year-old Soviet cosmonaut and Air Force test pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go into space. The flight lasted one hour and forty-eight minutes. It was a turning point in history — and, being at the height of the Cold War, a propaganda triumph for the Soviet Union, which had now clearly won the first leg of the space race.
At the time, the officially atheist Soviet propaganda machine announced that Gagarin had said, “I went up to space, but I did not encounter God.” The line is a fabrication, almost certainly belonging to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Gagarin never said it. What he actually said, on returning to Earth, was this: “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.”
The message, profound as it was, did not serve the motivations of his masters. It was useless to them. It was not that this was a message they did not care to hear; they simply had no use for it.
