On Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, the temperature is about =290 degrees Fahrenheit and the atmosphere is mostly methane. At such temperature methane behaves much like water does here. On the surface it forms oceans and rivers that evaporate into clouds that condense, and liquid methane falls as rain. Looking at the surface of Titan, one might imagine they were seeing canyons cut by rivers, and be correct, just not rivers of water. Water is our reference point, and it doesn’t apply on Titan where any water is frozen and has the physical properties of stone. Our perception is Earth-centric. Suppose the same is true of our understanding of time.
I’m often surprised by my experience of time. One day or moment feels like it will last for eternity, and then, some days, I’ll think back forty years and it will feel like it all happened yesterday. I am not unique in this regard. This is the human condition and everyone who comes to terms with it accommodates these feelings in their own way. In Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, the character Dunbar wants to live as long as possible. He has a theory:
“Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.”
Dunbar explains his thinking.
“How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.
Dunbar’s ironic solution to the conundrum posed by time was to remain as bored and uncomfortable as possible. It is comic.
Some years ago, back in the late 80s, I had returned to school and was doing odd shifts for an agency that placed mental health workers. It was a simple job that usually entailed spending a night sitting in a chair outside of the room of a combative patient suffering from dementia. For most of the night, the patients would sleep and I was able to study and read.
One night, at a hospital in Middleboro, Massachusetts a nurse offered to spell me at about 3am so I could take a walk, visit the bathroom, and get a coffee. I got a coffee out of the vending machine and walked around inside the deserted and mostly dark hospital. There was an entire wing that was closed and scheduled for renovation, so I poked around, trying to deduce what sort of medicine had been performed there. I stepped into a room about the size of a high school gymnasium that was lit only by the moonlight coming in at an angle through large windows. The entire space was filled with iron lung machines. There were maybe two hundred of them.
Those not of a certain age will have no memory of the iron lung. Polio—and paralytic polio in particular—has become a thing of the past. But in 1952, the nation saw the largest single outbreak of polio in US history: almost 58,000 cases across the nation. Of those, more than 21,000 people – mostly children – were left with varying degrees of disability, and 3,145 died. Polio kills by attacking motor neurons in the spinal cord, weakening or severing communication between the central nervous system and the muscles. The ensuing paralysis means that the muscles that make it possible to breathe no longer work. The iron lung was the only life saving treatment available when someone lost the ability to breathe on their own.
Think of a personal submarine. The patient was placed on their back in a long tube with just their head protruding through an airtight collar, and the tube was filled with air and then the air was removed. The positive and negative pressure would inflate and deflate the patient’s lungs. Some had to be in these lungs for most of the day. Others were confined 24/7. Individuals lived for years, many years, lifetimes, in these iron lungs. When I was a child in the 60s and 70s, many of these polio survivors were still among us. Each Christmas you could purchase cards designed and painted by people living in iron lungs, who painted the scenes using only their mouths. Most iron lungs had mirrors mounted so the person confined could look up and see the room, like a periscope. And this is how they lived out their lives. The most famous of these artists is probably Ann Adams, who was born in 1926, was paralyzed by polio in 1950, and supported herself as an artist until she died in 1992, painting entirely with brushes she held with her teeth. In an interview in 1983 she told the reporter. “My story is a story of joy. I am not a tragedy.”
When I came upon the room full of retired iron lungs it was like looking at graveyard that had been personalized by the deceased, because each unit had graffiti written and painted on the surfaces that could be reached by a pen or a brush held in the mouth. The machines were painted in various colors of industrial paint, like houses—blues and pinks, greens and whites—that had been scuffed and chipped over time, and each had a surname stenciled on the side.
I stood in that room, among maybe two hundred iron lungs, and I felt like I should weep for the lives that had been spent in each. I thought of Dunbar. If his theory was correct, all of the occupants would still be alive and the lungs, all of them, would be hissing as bellows filled each with pressure and then released it. It was a hell of a thing to look at and consider by moonlight at 3:30 in the morning. It made an impression. For about a half hour I walked among them, feeling the cold steel under my hand and reading the scribbles that were visible, imagining myself being placed in one knowing that this was it. One day, I would die there. How would I have handled such news?
Much would depend, I think, upon when in the arc of my life such news was delivered. When I was young and an egoist such news would have collapsed my understanding of the universe and created an existential tailspin. Today my attitude would be more along the lines of, “Well, that certainly sucks, but the universe isn’t going to notice or care that I’m prone, any more than it would if I was an NBA star.” I take bad news better as I age. I spend much less time cursing fate and much more being simply grateful. I spend no time at all attempting to carve my initials on reality in the belief that I (or anyone) has a legacy that will live on. That’s not how it works, and great evil is done by those who think that it is.
The news is full of evil these days, and maybe it has always been such. The Taliban has taken Afghanistan and it is hard to imagine a more delusional lot. Even the individuals in our government, as delusional as they are, fall short. The Taliban seem to believe that not only will the things they do resonate through the ages, but that God sanctions their hubris. And, with that as their fig leaf there will be slavery, rape, torture and murder on a wholesale scale. Delusional boobs, empowered by other delusional boobs.
That’s the lesson I draw from events today. Our political class and cultural elites are nothing more than credentialed buffoons. Their motives are as opaque to them as a hyena’s understanding of why it does what it does. We are not led by particularly deep people, and their actions are reported by people more shallow still. They bark at shadows and are always surprised when their choices have results. The US State Department spent far more time planning for Pride Month and the use of the proper pronouns than they did planning for departing Afghanistan and evacuating those who supported and helped us there, who will now be slaughtered and raped and sold. I don’t think the Taliban cares much about gender “being a spectrum” or fighting “white supremacy”. Gender inclusive language will not be a priority in Kabul going forward.
Humanity is young, and we still behave as humans have in the past. We just have better toys and tools. Six thousand years ago people also wondered what it is all about, why time passes and people get old and die. They, too, wondered why the universe seemed impartial and uncaring, and used that as an excuse to take what they wanted. Aztecs carved out the hearts of their enemies. The Romans crowded the Colosseum for days of choreographed slaughter. The Iroquois fought the Algonquins. The Mohawk fought the Wampanoag. The colonials denigrated the natives, and the natives denigrated the colonials. The Nazis blamed the Jews. If only, humans have been telling themselves since we began speaking, the problem of “those people” could be solved, everything would be peachy. Everything will never be peachy. One can not murder and rape their way to immortality. It’s been tried many times. That experiment has been done.
But imagine for a moment that we are wrong about time. Imagine if, rather than the linear progression we perceive, time just is—all of it, in all of it’s permutations, resonating outward like the ripples of a pebble tossed into a pond—going on forever. The first kiss, that beautiful sunset, a day on a beach, the hours in a sickbed, the joy, the suffering, all resonating forever. Would we make better choices?
On Titan it rains methane.
Peace.
So true; the exit is despicable and many who should have been evacuated were left behind.