about an interplanetary low

This is a test. In a few minutes the siren will trail off and the bullhorn will thank us for participating. Tests, drills: these occur every other day now. Strap on the oxygen mask, help mask others, duck, preferably under something sturdy.

What good will it do? None. Life here will end. Hard to imagine a time not so long ago when we rocketed ourselves to this place in hopes of making a life together.

about dragging

about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

We join a father and son journeying down a desolate but dangerous road cut through postapocalyptic America. They, suffering, were just trying to get to the end. I felt the same, reading this story in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

We're the good guys, the father says. But in time the boy begins to doubt, then grows wholly disbelieving. Through his seared-in allegiance to his son's preservation, the man abandons his capacity to trust, and so loses his humanity.

After figuring this out, the boy sees that, though he is his father's burden, he is the one shouldering the world. His humanity still budding, the boy worries for each damned soul they pass.

Having reached the coast and been turned back around, The Road finally concludes with father-protector dying, and son taking the hand of a stranger; whether this show of desperate hope and resigned trust will be rewarded is unknown.

Cormac McCarthy links hope and trust; and those, with youth. So what does this futuristic tale, published in 2006, say about our fate?

Unlike Cormac McCarthy's one-dimensional dustbin of days, our terrain grows more and more complicated, but also more open, with more people connected and more isolated and stratified at the same time. And here, again, we see that caution and the drive for self-preservation is as indispensable as the capacity for hope and trust. But, moreover, in Cormac McCarthy's world, both persist with us until our dying day. Cynical, pointless doom.

I appreciated that McCarthy's sparse prose reflected the desolate world he created, but I never got into this, and did not enjoy it in any sense.


 

the closing passage of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Abuse your illusions

In addition to events in your personal life, this year's Carrier IQ story and revelations about mental illness and its treatment show that everything that seems good is actually bad. And if not actually, then eventually. But that won't change anything.

(Taking the Carrier IQ story to its logical conclusion, in the not-too-distant future we'll have contact lens computer screens. Soon after that, thoughts can be harvested and stored on Google servers. Then thoughts will be stored on a centralized, searchable database. Scary!)

Happy New Year!