(185) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where, for Lucian, something similar existed in that other kind of navigation whose operations no commander could perceive, for it too had to move quickly, infinitely faster than the consciousness which, coming afterwards, might believe it had chosen what had often already been set in motion.

The body, Lucian thought, could not wait until it had examined every detail before standing upright; the hand could not recalculate every distance before grasping; the eye did not begin the world anew with every glance… accumulated experience had to become a shortcut, what had happened a hundred times had to make the hundred-and-first occurrence almost familiar before it had even finished taking place, and it was precisely this admirable economy that made it possible to move forward without stopping before every uncertainty.
But habit, when it succeeds for too long, acquires a peculiar authority. What was at first merely a hypothesis confirmed many times over may eventually take on the appearance of a law… and what ought to remain anticipation becomes certainty. Then the organism, which had learned to foresee in order to act more quickly, runs the risk of no longer recognising soon enough what, beneath an almost familiar form, is in the process of becoming something else.
Thus fog could be to the liner what uncertain information sometimes is to the mind: not the absence of every sign, but the presence of insufficient signs which speed compels us to complete. When sight no longer delivered the world in its entirety, something had necessarily to finish what sight no longer supplied, and the greater the confidence placed in acquired habits, the more easily the invisible could be given the form of what one expected to encounter rather than that—still nameless—of what was actually there.
There had been much reasoning about this, with that exacting patience which sometimes gives human decisions the appearance of having become necessary. If a smaller vessel were to strike the liner while it was travelling at full speed, it was thought, the violence of the impact would be distributed in such a way that the other hull would bear the greater part of it; if, on the contrary, the liner itself encountered a vessel in its path, it would still be better to strike it with all its power, for at reduced speed it risked damaging its bow, whereas at full speed it would most likely cut the obstacle in two and continue on its way with a few dented plates, perhaps a little paintwork to be redone—nothing, in any case, comparable to the disaster reserved for the other vessel.
The reasoning had thus transformed the encounter into a balance of forces before it had even occurred, and the liner’s size became the proof of its safety because it would necessarily become the misfortune of whatever was smaller than itself. The possibility of collision was not abolished… its effects were distributed in advance, with that strange faculty intelligence sometimes possesses of making a consequence acceptable once it has succeeded in placing it within a perfectly ordered chain of causes.
The other architecture, Lucian’s own, also knew something of that power. It too knew how to set aside, soften, sometimes forget what threatened the continuity of the whole… it possessed thresholds below which a thousand variations remained without importance, filters through which the ceaseless din of the world was prevented from becoming a ceaseless din within consciousness, and such selection was indispensable, for to receive everything with equal intensity might have made the slightest gesture impossible. The brain was therefore continually saving the one who inhabited it from a prodigious quantity of things it did not show him.
But that salvation had its reverse… what had not been judged important could continue to exist without being seen.
Reasoning, then, did not abolish the violence… it displaced it. It did not make collision impossible… it merely decided, in advance and almost peacefully, which of the two bodies would have to give way.
And perhaps one might say that within Lucian too something continually gives way so that something else may remain… one perception fades before another, a detail is abandoned so that the figure may appear, a memory alters slightly in order to meet what is coming, a contradiction too weak to matter is absorbed into the immense coherence of what one already believes oneself to know. This is not necessarily an error… it is often the very condition of intelligence, which could not think if at every moment it had to preserve every possibility as open. Only, there sometimes comes a moment when what has been set aside ceases to be negligible, when several small discrepancies, each one too slight on its own to force a revision of the whole, begin to answer one another. They do not yet form a danger… perhaps only a disquiet.
Very freely inspired by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898, for Lucian, something similar existed in that other kind of navigation whose operations no commander could perceive, for it too had to move quickly, infinitely faster than the consciousness which, coming afterwards, might believe it had chosen what had often already been set in motion.
The body, Lucian thought, could not wait until it had examined every detail before standing upright; the hand could not recalculate every distance before grasping; the eye did not begin the world anew with every glance… accumulated experience had to become a shortcut, what had happened a hundred times had to make the hundred-and-first occurrence almost familiar before it had even finished taking place, and it was precisely this admirable economy that made it possible to move forward without stopping before every uncertainty.
But habit, when it succeeds for too long, acquires a peculiar authority. What was at first merely a hypothesis confirmed many times over may eventually take on the appearance of a law… and what ought to remain anticipation becomes certainty. Then the organism, which had learned to foresee in order to act more quickly, runs the risk of no longer recognising soon enough what, beneath an almost familiar form, is in the process of becoming something else.
Thus fog could be to the liner what uncertain information sometimes is to the mind: not the absence of every sign, but the presence of insufficient signs which speed compels us to complete. When sight no longer delivered the world in its entirety, something had necessarily to finish what sight no longer supplied, and the greater the confidence placed in acquired habits, the more easily the invisible could be given the form of what one expected to encounter rather than that—still nameless—of what was actually there.
There had been much reasoning about this, with that exacting patience which sometimes gives human decisions the appearance of having become necessary. If a smaller vessel were to strike the liner while it was travelling at full speed, it was thought, the violence of the impact would be distributed in such a way that the other hull would bear the greater part of it; if, on the contrary, the liner itself encountered a vessel in its path, it would still be better to strike it with all its power, for at reduced speed it risked damaging its bow, whereas at full speed it would most likely cut the obstacle in two and continue on its way with a few dented plates, perhaps a little paintwork to be redone—nothing, in any case, comparable to the disaster reserved for the other vessel.
The reasoning had thus transformed the encounter into a balance of forces before it had even occurred, and the liner’s size became the proof of its safety because it would necessarily become the misfortune of whatever was smaller than itself. The possibility of collision was not abolished… its effects were distributed in advance, with that strange faculty intelligence sometimes possesses of making a consequence acceptable once it has succeeded in placing it within a perfectly ordered chain of causes.
The other architecture, Lucian’s own, also knew something of that power. It too knew how to set aside, soften, sometimes forget what threatened the continuity of the whole… it possessed thresholds below which a thousand variations remained without importance, filters through which the ceaseless din of the world was prevented from becoming a ceaseless din within consciousness, and such selection was indispensable, for to receive everything with equal intensity might have made the slightest gesture impossible. The brain was therefore continually saving the one who inhabited it from a prodigious quantity of things it did not show him.
But that salvation had its reverse… what had not been judged important could continue to exist without being seen.
Reasoning, then, did not abolish the violence… it displaced it. It did not make collision impossible… it merely decided, in advance and almost peacefully, which of the two bodies would have to give way.
And perhaps one might say that within Lucian too something continually gives way so that something else may remain… one perception fades before another, a detail is abandoned so that the figure may appear, a memory alters slightly in order to meet what is coming, a contradiction too weak to matter is absorbed into the immense coherence of what one already believes oneself to know. This is not necessarily an error… it is often the very condition of intelligence, which could not think if at every moment it had to preserve every possibility as open. Only, there sometimes comes a moment when what has been set aside ceases to be negligible, when several small discrepancies, each one too slight on its own to force a revision of the whole, begin to answer one another. They do not yet form a danger… perhaps only a disquiet.

Very freely inspired by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898