Mars, Rolling in Ecstasy at Your Feet

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen...learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

-Franz Kafka

From Peter Capaldi's comic short film Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life

Here on Earth, writing great literature, Kafka savored solitude. Now picture him at his own quiet table on Mars. There, red dust curling at his window edges, would he come up with an even more fantastic combination of disturbingly familiar and alien than his character Gregor Samsa?

There has been no lack of speculation in recent months about how humans might act and think within the solitude on Mars, or the pending potential quiet to surround a select few of the 100 candidates for Elon Musk's one-way journey to Mars. Theories swing wide, offering two visions of the new home planet - a calming landscape and welcome refuge for scientific learning, or a desolate scene of failed human advancement with Ray Bradbury's soft rains pattering in the background. Either way, it will require the astronauts to reach deep within. Maybe it will bring out the philosopher and writer in each of them. 

For starters, the journey is poetic: a new cosmology will emerge for the selected crew  - they'll relinquish deep-seated concepts of "home," rejigger their map of the Universe, call out goodbyes in final puffs of Earth air...and then? 

BBC TV

They have already weighed in.  “I do VERY well with solitude,” said 69-year-old computer programmer/Mars One candidate.

A Reverend/Mars One candidate added, “I have the feeling that spiritual issues would come up among the crew. The early explorers on Earth always took clergy with them.” 

As the ship hurtles toward Mars, idle dinner talk may meander through ethics, love, religion. Introspection can go a long way in tight quarters, and be useful while composing soon-to-be-famous words for the riveting moment when the first boots grind into red Martian gravel. Will the astronauts go big picture Mahatma Gandhi-an, or opt for ambling and poignant Louis C.K.-ish to show us that Mars can be funny, too? There will be plenty of time to come up with something clever during the 7 month trip. 

To get a better sense of the tight-quarters potential, we researched writers who honed their craft in solitude - Nathaniel Hawthorne (stayed in his bedroom all day), Ernest Hemingway (wrote standing up, alone), Marcel Proust (made himself a cork-lined room)... 

Proust wrote in his cork-lined room

Marco Polo dictated the account of his global travels in 1298 while imprisoned in Genoa. Solitude enabled strange revisions. The accounts were so fantastical - one city had 12,000 bridges over its canals, Kublai Khan traveled with 1,000 elephants - that the book became known as Il Milione (The Million Lies) and was, of course, a pop hit in medieval Europe. On his death bed, Polo was urged to save face and retract the tales. His defiant, writerly reply: "I have not told half of what I saw."

And we can't leave out Emily Dickinson: stayed mostly in her parents’ home, would only speak to visitors from behind the closed front door, had neighbors' tongues wagging. But from confinement emerged poetry that still plumbs the depths of the human soul:

                                  I felt a funeral in my brain, 
                                       And mourners to and fro  
                                       Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
                                   That sense was breaking through...

A fantastic mind and a pencil, in a tiny quiet space on Mars. All you'd need?

No. 

Because pencils in space, as you may know, are VERY dangerous.

According to NASA, the lack of gravity in flight makes the release of wood shavings, graphite dust, and ink compounds a hazard. Particles can drift, infect the lungs and eyes. Conductive materials can impede electronics. Rubber in erasers is combustible.      

Solutions have come about over the years. In the 1960's Gemini Programs, NASA tried the mechanical pencil (but it still contained lead), the Soviet space program tried grease pencils on plastic slates (messy, didn't last as long as ink), and they both tried ballpoint pens (ink is indelible and subject to outgassing and temperature variations, and there's no gravity to pull it to the ball of the pen). Enter one Mr. Fisher of Fisher Pens, who developed the high tech Space Pen (or Zero Gravity Pen), a gas-charged ball point pen that could stand up to zero gravity, vacuums and extreme temperatures. 

NASA noted the high tech wonder of the thing and bought a bunch for the Apollo missions. The cosmonauts soon followed. Nowadays, a combination of Fisher pens, pressurized ballpoint pens, thicker-leaded pencils, and Sharpies are an astronaut's choice.

With a simple (safe!) writing implement, and solitude, the great canon of Martian literature could begin to emerge. Cue moody David Bowie background music: 

                                    "For here 
                                   Am I sitting in a tin can       

                                     Far above the world
                                     Planet Earth is blue
                                  And there's nothing I can do."

Write on, Earthlings.