A Dark Night in the North Atlantic
...an unscheduled autopsy, submarines, and Pompey's elephants...
This morning, early, before I’d even had my first cup of tea, and in the wake of news that the stock market was caught in a death spiral — the worst day in its history and tanking on wholly unfounded global anxiety and media driven perfidy — I received an excellent text from my daughter. She wrote: “At an autopsy with detectives for a potential homicide.” Which was proof again that life in the twisting alleyways of Rome goes on, flame lit and gruesome, whether trading in the plaza has been suspended or not.
More to the point, and even hundreds of miles away, I could hear the bonesaws whining.
Some years ago, hours into a flight to England with my father, he tapped me on the shoulder, pulling me out of a deep walk through Thomas Berger’s masterpiece “Little Big Man” to have a look out the window. We were flying into the purpling horizon but the sky was clear, and far below, in an endless and slate-gray stew, churned the forbidding waters of the North Atlantic.
Raised on tales of pilots and sea captains who braved that crossing in wooden boats or strapped aboard flying gas cans, navigating by sunstone and stopwatch, I understood perfectly well what my father wanted me to imbibe from that vision, which had everything to do with properly framing the scale of human bravery against the elements. My father’s wry smile – he was an accomplished pilot familiar with visions into the abyss — suggested something else as well, something cold and briny as the sea, which was the truth we must all eventually embrace: we are not, in fact, in this together.
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