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20 March 2025

6 min read

Magnificent or mundane: how do you react to the overview effect?

Creators of a book, an album and a game, can’t agree.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A small white space capsule orbits around the earth.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule orbits above Earth.

NASA.

As I write this, two Nasa astronauts – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore (possibly the most USA-sounding name imaginable) – are preparing to leave the International Space Station to return to Earth. They were supposed to stay on the space station for eight days, but a technical problem with their spacecraft meant they’ve been stranded in space for nine months.

Nine. Months.

It sounds like the premise for a horror film. Two stranded astronauts slowly descend into madness as they become increasingly isolated and cut off from humanity. Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, probably.

That’s a lot of time to be stuck orbiting Earth, gazing at the pale blue dot, contemplating our little corner of the universe. There’s a phenomenon called the overview effect: a shift in thinking astronauts go through when they see Earth from space. Putting the planet into the wider context of the entire cosmos leads observers to rethink humanity’s place in the universe, and what it means to be human. I imagine Suni and Butch have had quite a bit of time to do just that in recent months.

And the overview effect is currently having a bit of a moment in wider culture, too.

If you went into any bookshop in the weeks before Christmas, you likely saw stacks of Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital. It tells the story – although there’s not much by way of traditional ‘story’ in Orbital – of six astronauts on the International Space Station, pondering the nature of humanity from their lofty vantage point.

Having won the booker prize, booksellers were keen to encourage readers to buy Oribtal. Praised by the Booker Prize judges for its “beauty and ambition”, I was looking forward to reading it, when I could. (And, let’s be honest, it’s a short book, which probably helped sales. Who has the time to read Ulysses or Infinite Jest in between school runs and weekly shops?)

When I finally read it in January, I was left disappointed. I found a surprising lack of humanity in Orbital. With the exception of one astronaut – who spends her time mourning her recently deceased mother some 250 miles up in the sky – the characters feel somewhat paper thin; barely human. As the story meanders from person to person, never really settling on one character long enough to really develop them, it feels a bit … insubstantial?

Maybe it’s a victim of its own hype. Maybe the not-quite-humanness of the astronauts and the listless quality of the narrative are intentional, designed to capture the ungrounded nature of life in space in both form and content. Maybe that’s being generous. Either way, I was left closing the book and shrugging my shoulders. If Orbital was supposed to offer a glimpse into that overview effect, it left me nonplussed.

By coincidence, Steven Wilson has just released his eighth solo album: The Overview. Who is Steven Wilson, you ask? Only “probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of” according to The Daily Telegraph. With Wilson’s album currently sitting at #1 in the UK album charts, it doesn’t seem an unwarranted title.

In The Overview, Wilson explores the overview effect across just two lengthy pieces of music. In the first, Wilson contrasts the mundanities of life on Earth with the chaos of space, calling us to attend to miracle that is humanity, thanks to lyrics written by the annoyingly talented Andy Partridge of XTC:

“And there in an ordinary street

A car isn't where it would normally be

The driver in tears, about his payment arrears

Still, nobody hears whеn a sun disappears in a galaxy afar.”

With Partridge’s help, Wilson manages to capture that humanity so sorely lacking in Orbital. Amid a sea of seemingly barren space, there is life here on this small, pokey planet, and the dramas and stresses of a man fretting about his debts don’t seem out of place, even when compared to the implosion of a star on the other side of the universe.

All this makes a recent interview with Wilson all the more odd.

When speaking about the overview effect, Wilson says “Your life is futile, it’s meaningless – and isn’t that a wonderful thing?” before doubling down: “And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective.”

For Wilson, this perspective – this overview effect – is liberating. It allows to stop navel-gazing, to pick our heads up and to realise our freedom to do whatever we want. After all, everything’s just matter in varying different arrangements:

“The clouds have no history

And the sea feels no sorrow

The oxygen recycled

And the atoms are just borrowed,”

At the climax of the album’s second epic, Wilson sings – with more glee than it warrants –

“There's no reason for anything

Just a beautiful infinity

No design and no onе at the wheel.”

Cheery stuff.

It's easy to see why, in the same interview, Wilson rails against the concept of religion: “Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo … To even understand even the very simplest, most basic facts about space, should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion of God. But apparently it doesn’t.”

It all sounds a bit like an angsty teenager encountering the New Atheists for the first time. And this edge to Wilson’s work jars uncomfortably with the humanitarian streak that runs through his music. Wilson wants (rightly) to celebrate the mundane, the ordinary, and the human. And simultaneously wants to tell us that we’re just … stuff. Just atoms arranged in one way or another. Wilson pays lip-service to the humanity missing from Orbital, but it’s superficial.

And all this reminds me of my favourite video game ever: 2019’s The Outer Wilds. (Not to be confused with 2019’s also-space-based-but-decidedly-mediocre The Outer Worlds). In The Outer Wilds, you play as an alien with a ramshackle spaceship who sets off to explore their solar system. Except every 22 minutes, the sun explodes. When it does, you wake up on your home planet and start again.

You use these 22-minute loops to explore the solar system, flying manually from planet to planet, and exploring every nook and cranny of them in the process. You see awe-inspiring sights and are confronting with the absolute otherness and horror of the vastness of space.

And yet. As you explore, you come across notes left by long-forgotten civilizations. Mundane lists and frustrated exchanges between colleagues. You come across life, in other words, even if you don’t meet many other actual people. I can’t say much more than this without ruining the game: The Outer Wilds depends on your real-world knowledge to progress, and so, the more I tell you, the more I ruin.

But, suffice it to say that this is exactly what is missing from Harvey and Wilson’s work. While they both ostensibly want to remind us of the value and the miracle of humanity, both leave me feeling cold. Both leave me with the impression that life is little more than atoms arranged one way and not the other. Just stuff.

But in The Outer Wilds, the sun’s implosion – and all that is lost with it – is a genuine heartbreak every single time. I think about all the stories I’ve read, and the people I’ve met, and how it’s all about to be lost as a bright supernova washes over me. And then I wake up again at the start of the cycle, relieved that all is not lost.

If you can, you should play The Outer Wilds. It’s beautiful. Really, really beautiful. More so than Orbital or The Overview. Our place in the universe can be overwhelming; we’re small, and the universe is strange and scary. But we’re not just insignificant stuff. Our stories and the people we share them with matter. And Outer Wilds captures this tension impeccably. Only it captures life’s miraculous nature in the way it deserves.

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Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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