When the lights of Cape Town come they’re a talon that marks the beginning, or end, of a continent

When the lights of Cape Town come they’re a talon that marks the beginning, or end, of a continent of several thousand miles. The ascending orbit moves up its coast, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia. Africa is dusty brown in the moonlit night, sparsely clouded, and electrified by lightning across its breadth. Its city lights are discreet and scant. Maputo here, Harare there, Lusaka over there, Mombasa ahead, and each is a small heap of gold coins on a tapestried cloth, joined by nothing – no night-lit roads or urban sprawl. A beautiful velvety poverty of man on an earth that tips into the void; you feel you’d fall off, except with each new moment there’s yet more earth, and you follow its trail across the Gulf of Aden to the Middle East.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 1,825

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 302

Every town has its Rawlinson report, its grim accounts of filthy streets and wretched, overcrowded hovels. Why dwell on such details? In Britain most of us doing family history will find that our ancestors were poor by our standards; their lives were harder, shorter; they lived in accommodation we could hardly stomach, on streets whose stench would make us gag; their diseases were more terrible and unchecked; their morality wayward and improvised; their accidents crippling. They coped; they put up with it; they died of it. From the perspective of much of the documentation of the period, my ancestors were merely part of what one local historian of Portsmouth calls ‘the perennial inescapable problem of poverty’. But much of it was escapable. Why go back to the past only to feel washed by an amorphous pity? Anger is more bracing. Nor is this merely a matter

Ec Why dwell on such details? In Britain most of us doing family history will find that our ancestors were poor by our standards; their lives were harder, shorter; they lived in accommodation we could hardly stomach, on streets whose stench would make us gag; their diseases were more terrible and unchecked; their morality wayward and improvised; their accidents crippling. They coped; they put up with it; they died of it. From the perspective of much of the documentation of the period, my ancestors were merely part of what one local historian of Portsmouth calls ‘the perennial inescapable problem of poverty’. But much of it was escapable. Why go back to the past only to feel washed by an amorphous pity? Anger is more bracing. 

A. Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (2014), loc. 3,479

People want to know where they came from but they also want to know where they could have gone

Family history constantly goes back to the future, mapping the distances that grow between the branches, asking why some flourish and others wither – historical questions which are always more than a matter of individual character. People want to know where they came from but they also want to know where they could have gone and why their branch of the family did not go there.

A. Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (2014), loc. 1,680