It was on a morning of eleven degrees and leaden skies over Nantes – that good city where the Loire gathers its final strength before surrendering to the Atlantic – that I set about examining the dispatches which had arrived from every quarter of the globe. And what dispatches they were! I confess that even in my most feverish imaginings, I could not have contrived a day so rich in the extraordinary.
Let us begin, as any sensible Frenchman must, with the heavens.
The crew of the Artemis II – Commander Wiseman and his brave companions – have taken a photograph of our Earth from the windows of their Orion capsule as they speed towards the Moon. A photograph! From a vessel in transit between two celestial bodies! I wrote once of a projectile fired from a great cannon in Florida, carrying three men to the lunar surface, and I was called a fantasist. Now the Americans have launched their capsule from that very same state, and no one thinks it remarkable in the least. But I find it remarkable. I find it profoundly, achingly remarkable. The image they have captured shows our planet as a sphere of blue and white, suspended in the void – beautiful, fragile, and, to judge by the day's other dispatches, thoroughly determined to set itself on fire.
For while men ascend towards the Moon, the Chinese are not far behind. Beijing pursues its own lunar programme with what the American journals describe as "formidable focus," and the great powers circle each other in the cosmos as they have always circled each other on the seas. One cannot help but observe that the space between nations shrinks even as the space they explore expands.
But it is on the seas themselves – those ancient highways of commerce and conflict – that the most dramatic chapter of this day unfolds. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow passage between the Persian Gulf and the open ocean, has become a theatre of war. Iran has blockaded the waterway. American warplanes have been sent to break the blockade, and two of them have fallen from the sky – an F-15E shot down over Iranian territory, its crew member missing, and a second aircraft crashed near the Gulf, its pilot recovered. The Iranians celebrate in Tehran. The Americans demand the strait be reopened. And somewhere in the narrow waters between Oman and the Iranian coast, a French-owned vessel of the CMA CGM line has threaded the passage – the first ship of a major European firm to attempt the crossing since hostilities began.
I have always held a particular fascination for straits. They are the hinges of the world, the points at which geography compels all of humanity's traffic through a single door. The Strait of Magellan, the Bosphorus, the Strait of Malacca – control the strait and you control the commerce of nations. That a French ship should be the one to test the passage does not surprise me. We have been sailing through dangerous waters since La Pérouse, and we have not always come home, but we have never stopped sailing.
Meanwhile, the American president has requested one and a half trillion dollars for his military – a sum so vast that I must pause to consider it. One trillion, five hundred billion dollars. When I wrote of Captain Nemo's limitless wealth, plundered from the treasures of sunken galleons, I thought I had imagined the most extravagant fortune conceivable. I was, it appears, a man of modest imagination. This budget would cut the funds for schools and hospitals and the ordinary business of a republic in order to feed the machinery of war. Nemo, at least, had the decency to wage his campaign alone.
From the theatres of conflict, let us turn to the theatres of captivity and freedom – for they are, in this world, never far apart.
Cuba has begun releasing more than two thousand prisoners. The pardons come during Holy Week, and Havana calls them a humanitarian gesture, though the hand of Washington is visible in every clause. An oil embargo has starved the island, and a Russian tanker has been permitted – just barely – to deliver fuel to a nation running on fumes. I have sailed those Caribbean waters in my mind a hundred times, past the coral reefs and the fortified harbours, and I have always imagined Cuba as a place of tremendous vitality held under tremendous pressure, like steam in a boiler. The prisoners walk free into streets where there is little fuel, little food, and a government that bends but does not break. Whether they walk into liberty or merely into a larger prison – that is a question the dispatches do not answer.
In Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré – a military man who seized power in the manner military men have always seized power – has declared that his people should "forget about democracy." It is not for them, he says. I have encountered this philosophy before, in the mouths of kings and emperors and the petty tyrants of imaginary islands. It is always the man holding the sword who discovers that the people are not yet ready to govern themselves. Traoré speaks with the confidence of a man who has never been on the other side of the blade.
And in Myanmar, the general who overthrew the elected government five years ago has now awarded himself the title of president, having conducted elections that were, by all accounts, a performance staged by the military for the military's benefit. The curtain rises, the ballots are counted, and the man with the guns takes a bow. It is a farce worthy of a lesser playwright – though I confess the suffering it produces is anything but theatrical.
On this Good Friday, Palestinian Christians gathered at the Holy Family Church in Gaza to pray during a fragile ceasefire. In Lebanon, Christians observed the same holy day while Israeli strikes shook the ground beneath their churches. In Ukraine, Russia unleashed a wave of drone attacks that the correspondents have called an "Easter escalation" – as if the calendar of faith were merely another front in the war.
I sit in Nantes, under overcast skies, and I think of my old character Phileas Fogg, who wagered that he could circle the globe in eighty days. Today, the news circles the globe in eighty seconds, and what it carries is not the wonder of distant lands but the weight of distant suffering. And yet – and yet – there is that photograph from the Orion capsule. There is the Earth, whole and luminous, taken by men who have left its quarrels behind, if only for a few days, if only by a few hundred thousand kilometres.
Perhaps that is the voyage we have not yet undertaken – not around the world, nor to the Moon, nor to the bottom of the sea, but the journey from what we are to what we might become. It is, I suspect, the longest voyage of all. But I have never been discouraged by distance.
The skies over Nantes are grey. The temperature is eleven degrees. The Loire flows on, as it always has, towards the sea.
