At an altitude of seventy or eighty thousand feet, the view of a planet was always dizzyingly beautiful. At times, the captain ordered that the transparent walls of the meeting room be closed in order to prevent the distraction that this violent and forever extraordinary spectacle caused to the men and women of the crew. There were cases, in the records, of astronauts whom beauty had driven mad; pushed to suicide. It was called Pesquet’s syndrome. One couldn’t lay their eyes on these immemorial lights, these clouds which seemed like pieces of color torn off from the first jolts of the universe, these curved horizons bathed in surreal clearness, one couldn’t embrace a whole world, in its sublime finiteness, without having the impression of violating a mortal secret.

Chapter 2, Missions