‘The Narrative Imagination’: Martha Craven Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p.89.
‘reveal to them an alternative world’: Daniel Burke, ‘A rock star was asked what God’s voice sounds like. His answer is beautiful’, cnn.com, 30 June 2019.
‘This is also storm chasing’: David Hoadley profile in Stormtrack magazine; https://stormtrack.org/whos-who-in-storm-chasing/david-hoadley/.
Chapter 4: Why We Need Silence
‘The melodies and silences of Heaven’: Clive Staples Lewis, Five Best Books in One Volume, Iversen Associates, Washington D.C., 1969, digitised in 2008, Indiana University, p.80.
‘fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague’: James L. Hildebrand, Noise Pollution and the Law, William S. Hein/University of California, 1970, p.62.
‘our increasingly silence-avoiding culture’: Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence, Counterpoint, Berkeley, California, 2010, pp.39–40.
As Florence Nightingale wrote: Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What it is, and What it is Not, D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1860, p.47.
True quiet . . . is the ‘think tank of the soul’: See Gordon Hempton and John Grossman, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2009; Julia Baird, ‘America’s vanishing silent spaces’, Newsweek, 27 October 2010; and Hempton’s website, www.soundtracker.com.
‘Silence is the moonlit song of the coyote’: Hempton and Grossman, One Square Inch of Silence, pp.2–3.
‘I am filled with gratitude to have heard it’: Baird, ‘America’s vanishing silent spaces’.
‘Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day’: A reflection by Miriam Rose Ungunmerr, ‘Dadirri: inner deep listening and quiet still awareness’, author’s own copy, used with permission.
Chapter 5: The Overview Effect
‘I realized how insignificant we all are’: Newsweek Staff, ‘The Earth behind a man’s thumb”, Newsweek, 11 October 2007. Lovell was also struck by the vibrancy of the Earth in contrast to the Moon: ‘The Moon is nothing but shades of gray and darkness. But the Earth — you could see the deep blues of the seas, the whites of the clouds, the salmon pink and brown of the land masses.’
‘evangelists, preaching the gospel of orbit’: Christian Davenport and Julie Vitkovskaya, ‘50 astronauts, in their own words’, The Washington Post, 19 June 2019.
renewed faith or on a quest for wisdom: Astronauts have returned as born-again Christians (Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke), a poet (Apollo 14’s Al Worden), an evangelist (Apollo 15’s Jim Irwin), and a founder of an institute devoted to understanding the science of inner wisdom (Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell).
grilling them about their responses: David B. Yaden, Jonathan Iwry et al, ‘The Overview Effect: Awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight’, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2016, vol.3, no.1, pp.1–11. See also L. Reinerman-Jones and B. Sollinsa, ‘Neurophenomenology: An integrated approach to exploring awe and wonder’, South African Journal of Philosophy, 2013, 32:4, pp.295–309.
‘scars of national boundaries’: Stacy Shaw, ‘The Overview Effect’, Psychology in Action, 1 January 2017.
‘you feel this incredible connection to the Earth’: Ibid.
‘very connected with the rest of the universe’: Mick Brady, ‘Star explorer Mae Jamison: The sky connects us, TechNewsWorld, 13 November 2018.
‘Life is best when you live deeply and look up’: Amy McCaig, ‘Jemison: “Life is best when you live deeply and look up”’, Rice University website, 13 May 2017.
‘the sad beauty of human suffering’: Benito Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, p.325.
‘To watch the sun sink behind a flower clad hill’: Zeami Motokiyo, quoted by Yury Lobo, In the Wake of Basho: Bestiary in the Rock Garden, Xlibris Corporation, US, 2016.
Yūgen . . . ‘an awareness of the universe’: Christopher Chase, ‘Yugen’, Traditional Kyoto website.
Kathryn D. Sullivan . . . was also gobsmacked:Shaw, ‘The Overview Effect’.
‘stunned in a way that was completely unexpected’: Yasmin Tayag, ‘Six NASA astronauts describe the moment in space “when everything changed”’, Inverse, 27 March 2018.
space . . . makes people ‘more in touch with humanity’: Richard Feloni, ‘NASA astronaut Scott Kelly explains how seeing planet Earth from space changed his perspective on life’, Business Insider, 27 February 2018.
‘The planet is incredibly beautiful’: Ibid.
This . . . can lead people to make smarter global decisions: Chris Hadfield, ‘How space travel expands your mind’, bigthink.com, 23 March 2018.
‘Pale Blue Dot’: Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Ballantine Books, Random House, New York, 1994.
Part II: We Are All Wiggly
Why we need to tell our imperfect stories
our lives inevitably arc from good to bad: Dan P. McAdams, ‘The redemptive self: Generativity and the stories Americans live by’, Research in Human Development, 2006, vol.3, nos 2 and 3, pp.81–100.
Psychologists have also long found signs: Christopher Peterson, Martin E. Seligman and George E. Vaillant, ‘Pessimistic explanatory style is a risk factor for physical illness: A thirty-five-year longitudinal study’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 1988, vol.55, no.1, pp.23–27.
‘create a virtuous cycle of care’: Brady K. Jones and Dan P. McAdams, ‘Becoming generative: Socializing influences recalled in life stories in late midlife’, Journal of Adult Development, September 2013, vol.20, no.3, pp.158–172.
‘for each of us is a biography, a story’: Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Simon & Schuster, London, 1988, p.110.
‘People are really a slave to winning people’s approvals’: Dan Wootton, ‘Madge’s war on social media’, The Sun, 14 June 2019.
‘edit their pictures in order for them to look “perfect”’: Young Health Movement, #StatusOfMind: Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing, Royal Society for Public Health, May 2017.
A man needs such a narrative . . . to maintain his identity’: Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, p.111.
no one can make you feel inferior: This quote appears to have been first published in Reader’s Digest in September 1940. According to the Quote Investigator website, it is likely a synthesis of remarks Eleanor Roosevelt made after being snubbed at an event at the University of California in 1935, when the first lady defined a snub as ‘the effort of a person who feels superior to make someone else feel inferior. To do so, he has to find someone who can be made to feel inferior.’ See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/30/no-one-inferior.