Slept well. Today is a milestone. Three months since we’ve been a pair. What can I say? Right now we communicate little with each other. It’s not easy. The main thing is to fulfill the program. And not to snap during conversations with the ground. Got up and started repairing the water regeneration system — SRVK, replacing the liquid breakthrough indicator. Tolya was doing visual observations. I didn’t want to call him; decided to do everything myself. After lunch there was a television report “Three Months in Orbit.” I asked the comm operator, Pyotr Ivanovich, what to talk about. I’m tired of talking about work. Let’s do it casually. He says: “Go ahead.” Then let’s imagine we’ve come to visit you at home. And you, naturally, just like us, would ask us the first question: “Well, how is it up there?” — meaning in space. Nothing special, I would answer: weightlessness, a closed volume, two of us, and work. We don’t even notice the weightlessness anymore, as if we’d always lived in it. The closed volume — you get used to that too after about two months.

The station for us is like a small island in the ocean, and so you have to learn to build your world and limit yourself to it, rather than gazing into the distance of Earth and sighing. People live in the North, in deserts, they adapt — and so do we. And the fact that there are two of us — that of course is not easy, since we’re different people, in many ways with different interests and different upbringings. We’re already 40, and we can, and in some ways are obligated, to be reasonable people in our actions. And as for the spiritual atmosphere on the station, it’s almost earthly, since with every cargo ship and visiting expedition come letters, photographs, newspapers. Every week we meet with our families, loved ones, friends. It’s also important who communicates with us daily — which operators, which specialists.

I looked back at my diary entry after two months of flight. Relations were good. Now contradictions are emerging. They’re on the rise. This is worrying. We need to stop. Today I looked out the porthole, and I want to share what you feel and how you perceive the Earth from space after three months of flight. First, my gaze has become calmer; earlier I strove to take in everything, now I look more carefully, at individual regions. I compare and analyze more. There are fewer emotions from the beauty of the Earth, its horizon, the clouds, the oceans, the fires, the dust storms. They’ve gone deeper, but the feeling of grandeur of the picture you observe still fills you with wonder and calms you. I would say it hypnotizes you, switches off all extraneous thoughts and focuses everything on itself — the sphere of Earth, the stars, the dense blackness of space. Sometimes you look and understand that it’s a staircase without end, a staircase into the unknown, into the incomprehensible, and you’re standing on the first step thinking: where does it lead? But the beginning has been made by man, and he will go forward and open new secrets of nature. In this lies humanity’s purpose and its immortality. In difficult moments, when hopelessness, apathy, doubt, and irritation accumulated inside, I’d float to the porthole and start looking at the panorama of Earth — these gigantic masses of clouds, their ridges and spirals with such diversity of form, structure, composition — now it’s an enormous field of snow-white ferns, or a giant ice drift on a mighty river with enormous ice floes colliding, climbing over each other, shattering and turning into airy foam. Or it’s an enormous blue stage where I saw airy ballerinas in the snow-white veil of cloud, slender like little fountains on the blue expanse of the ocean, or against the red-brown background of Africa, or on Australia’s astonishing mountain mosaic, or on the coral-colored high plateau of the Himalayas with turquoise and emerald inlays of lakes surrounded by the world’s highest snow-covered peaks and glaciers.

This pulls you in and hypnotizes you so much that all your troubles fade away, and spiritual relief comes. Here I understood why people found solace in visiting a church. When a person with all their cares and the everyday ordinariness of the old way of life entered a cathedral — a magnificent creation of human talent, of architecture, of painting — and saw those enormous volumes, the high vaulted walls, the beautiful murals, the amazing colors, an entirely different world of sounds — the person dissolved with all their problems in this world, and when they came out, they felt relief from the contact with another world, the world of beauty, and from this mysterious thing they felt better. They didn’t understand what was happening; they saw the cause in God, when in reality it lay in the beauty created by man himself and deified by him. And so I, when things were hard, would go to the porthole to look at the Earth — I called it “going to church,” because here I was touching the divinely magnificent beauty of nature itself.