Bidding Adieu to America's Ghost Ship

As the S.S. United States, the most beautiful and the fastest of all of the 20th century ocean liners, makes her way under a long, single tow line, with no one aboard, down the East Coast and around the Florida peninsula to Alabama, where she will be fitted for her transition to the world's largest artificial reef, I dream of her.

In my dream, she speeds through crowded New York and New Jersey waters with abandon.  Her bow is made of wood and it is splintering at the water line.  At flank speed she shudders and shakes.  All aboard fear that she will founder mid-Atlantic.

All of this is nonsense of course.  From 1952 until 1969, she made the transatlantic passage every five days or so with elegance and ease.  My dream reflects a general angst and sorrow at her fate, at the pictures we will soon see of her iconic funnels, vibrant in her heyday but now a very faded red, white and blue, sinking beneath the waves.

 

The Direction of Time

Physicists tell us that there is no reason in principle why time should not run backwards.  Yet they also tell us that the overall entropy of the system is destined to increase until we live in a universe of maximum disorder.  The movement towards disorder is a way that we mark the progress, forward, of time.

Like Pigpen in the "Peanuts" comic strip, I leave behind me a dense trail of dirt and dust.  In principle, my entire life history could be reconstituted from the dirt and the dust.

In principle.

 

A Classic Case of Hubris

It has been seven years now.  I thought that, using my own powers of discernment and focus, I could ride the bus towards "Big-D" disclosure of what is behind the veil.  But the veil frustrates all such attempts.  The closer one gets to it, the faster it seems to recede.

Moses did not make it to the Promised Land.  Magellan did not complete the circumnavigation.  J.D. Madden's concept of the "hyperobject" comes into play. 

Picture the monolith of Kubrick's Space Odyssey, but on a scale like that of the Great Wall of China.  The perfect blackness, the perfect flatness, do communicate something to us, but what they communicate is impenetrability.  We can touch it.  Indeed, touching it can change us, perhaps change the trajectory of humankind.  But we can't know it.