Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira Page B
Authors: Carlos Meneses-Oliveira
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being financially comfortable, did not belong to the jet set in which the professor moved. Doctor Crane, fifty-eight, a graduate in hospital architecture, spent his younger years designing surgical centers. Later, he volunteered for military service and, afterwards, decided to dedicate himself to engineering life support systems. It was through this competency that he arrived at the American space agency.
He had been one of the critics of both the Americans’ and the Russians’ inability to integrate the needs of pure and simple engineering with human nature in the old ISS, the first International Space Station. That transformed it into a spider’s web of cables, monitors, keyboards, and the like invading the areas where six people lived, with almost no windows to peer out—at least until 2010, the point at which they received a window facing the earth and a passenger compartment so they would no longer have to sleep among the electric cables.
Prof. Crane said the ISS was a step backward in relation to Skylab, suffering from what he called the Leningrad Syndrome that he attributed to NASA’s distant military origins: astronauts were chosen from among people who would have been able to survive the siege of Leningrad, so dehumanizing was the environment in which they fulfilled their six month missions. There had even been occasions in which the Americans and the Russians strangely competed, each trying to prove that they could live more uncomfortably than the other, in a station whose final objective was not supposed to be unbearable.
“The Leningrad Syndrome is less rare than you think,” Crane explained. “There are innumerous situations in which people are willing to or even seek unnecessary discomfort, to prove that they’re there to dedicate themselves to a mission or a job and not to look for the easiest route. During my time as a hospital architect, I came across this disease frequently, principally among surgeons,” Anthony Crane said. “It’s a variant,” he continued, “of our workaholic culture, stemming from the obsolete Catholic expiation of our sins via penitence. The Popes have pulled the rug out from under those rituals, but we are still hesitant to do so.”
Crane created a novel paradigm in the new space station’s modules—the invisible engineering. Instead of the Spartan, tough astronaut who distinguished himself by being able to accomplish his tasks in an artificially hostile environment, they now wanted a creative astronaut, productive but humanized, and, thus Crane’s famous invisible engineering—everything had to be there but nothing could be visible. The professor saw an opportunity to apply it in everything. He insisted that it never meant “not being able to see the engineering” but, rather, in “being able to not see the engineering.” The secret panels in medieval libraries, where a door disguised as a piece of furniture full of books that, upon opening, gave way to a hidden area, were his inspiration. But, if in ancestral times the idea was to not see the camouflaged compartment, now the idea was to be able to maintain the beauty of the entire library, when one did not need access to the accessary compartment while working. Invisible engineering was the cortex’s rational counterproposal to the Leningrad Syndrome advanced by the atavistic hypothalamus.
Now, the rest of the Dexters’ friends, Sofia thought, were only just curious variations of normal. They deserved to be observed, but not actually cited. Sofia always wound up knowing a lot about Mariah’s life. There were times when the house seemed like a television series with an endless number of episodes, but most of the time it felt as if she had always been a true part of that family.
Mariah’s father was someone who was
He had been one of the critics of both the Americans’ and the Russians’ inability to integrate the needs of pure and simple engineering with human nature in the old ISS, the first International Space Station. That transformed it into a spider’s web of cables, monitors, keyboards, and the like invading the areas where six people lived, with almost no windows to peer out—at least until 2010, the point at which they received a window facing the earth and a passenger compartment so they would no longer have to sleep among the electric cables.
Prof. Crane said the ISS was a step backward in relation to Skylab, suffering from what he called the Leningrad Syndrome that he attributed to NASA’s distant military origins: astronauts were chosen from among people who would have been able to survive the siege of Leningrad, so dehumanizing was the environment in which they fulfilled their six month missions. There had even been occasions in which the Americans and the Russians strangely competed, each trying to prove that they could live more uncomfortably than the other, in a station whose final objective was not supposed to be unbearable.
“The Leningrad Syndrome is less rare than you think,” Crane explained. “There are innumerous situations in which people are willing to or even seek unnecessary discomfort, to prove that they’re there to dedicate themselves to a mission or a job and not to look for the easiest route. During my time as a hospital architect, I came across this disease frequently, principally among surgeons,” Anthony Crane said. “It’s a variant,” he continued, “of our workaholic culture, stemming from the obsolete Catholic expiation of our sins via penitence. The Popes have pulled the rug out from under those rituals, but we are still hesitant to do so.”
Crane created a novel paradigm in the new space station’s modules—the invisible engineering. Instead of the Spartan, tough astronaut who distinguished himself by being able to accomplish his tasks in an artificially hostile environment, they now wanted a creative astronaut, productive but humanized, and, thus Crane’s famous invisible engineering—everything had to be there but nothing could be visible. The professor saw an opportunity to apply it in everything. He insisted that it never meant “not being able to see the engineering” but, rather, in “being able to not see the engineering.” The secret panels in medieval libraries, where a door disguised as a piece of furniture full of books that, upon opening, gave way to a hidden area, were his inspiration. But, if in ancestral times the idea was to not see the camouflaged compartment, now the idea was to be able to maintain the beauty of the entire library, when one did not need access to the accessary compartment while working. Invisible engineering was the cortex’s rational counterproposal to the Leningrad Syndrome advanced by the atavistic hypothalamus.
Now, the rest of the Dexters’ friends, Sofia thought, were only just curious variations of normal. They deserved to be observed, but not actually cited. Sofia always wound up knowing a lot about Mariah’s life. There were times when the house seemed like a television series with an endless number of episodes, but most of the time it felt as if she had always been a true part of that family.
Mariah’s father was someone who was
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