– Do you hear what I see?
– I don’t see what you hear…
Where, just like Lucian, who is making a long journey, one may observe from afar a vibration whose frequency is not quite the usual one, a movement whose effect the body corrects without knowing why, a light that lasts a little less long, something glimpsed at the edge of vision that disappears when one turns one’s head…
Almost nothing, and yet the brain possesses this strange ability sometimes to retain that almost nothing without yet being able to explain it, Lucian thought, as though some part of him had already begun to suspect what the whole of him continued calmly to ignore.
Beneath the hull, the waves continued their slow thrust. The liner rose with them, sometimes so slightly that one might have believed so considerable a mass was not moving at all, then descended again, recovering all its weight, and the movement began over and over, while the water struck the bow, opened, ran along either side of the hull and came together again far astern in a long seam of foam which the wind almost immediately unstitched.
The body, meanwhile, had long since ceased to wait for thought to tell it how to respond to this oscillation. It learned the ship as one learns a new way of walking, through a multitude of corrections so slight that none deserved to be noticed: the ankles yielded a little, the pelvis compensated, the head sought to preserve its horizon, while deep within the ear an apparatus older than any instrument aboard continuously informed the brain of inclination, acceleration, the barely begun fall, and at every instant muscles contracted before the person whose balance they were saving had even become aware of the danger to which they were responding.
It could therefore happen that a body already knew something that the one who said I did not yet know.
Not because it possessed some mysterious hidden knowledge, but because its responses began before words, because sensation often preceded explanation and because balance, once threatened, corrected the world before thought had even formulated that it had just moved. Long before the sea could enter the hull, it thus entered the legs, the shoulders, the vertebrae, altered the points of support, wordlessly taught a way of yielding and recovering, so that the liner which was meant to keep the ocean outside already carried, within the slightest body standing upon its decks, a small part of its movement.
Speed itself had eventually come to be understood as a form of safety, since a fast-moving ship, it was said, could more easily escape whatever appeared before it… all that was required was for the obstacle to be seen early enough, for the rudder to respond quickly enough, for the engines to obey, for the sea to grant the space necessary for the manoeuvre; but all these conditions, because they were always repeated together and because not one of them had yet failed, gradually seemed to lose their character as conditions and merge with the general certainty that, whatever might happen, the liner would know how to find its way through.
Perhaps the first true danger lay precisely there, because as yet it resembled no danger at all… not the failure of a machine, but the continuous success of all the machines… not ignorance of danger, but a knowledge abundant enough to create the feeling that no danger could ever present itself except in one of the forms already known. It was not a matter of lacking the means to react, but of being convinced that their speed would always make it possible to postpone the moment of reacting.
The brain might experience a similar intoxication without ever naming it. What it correctly anticipated yesterday reinforces today’s anticipation… each success increases the weight of the expectation that follows, and repetition eventually cuts through uncertainty a road so familiar that everything seems destined to continue travelling along it. The faster recognition came, the less time remained to ask whether the thing recognised was truly the same… the more easily a situation could be placed among those already passed through, the less chance whatever resisted that resemblance had of reaching consciousness.
Speed, then, was not merely the amount of distance covered within a given time. It could become a way of seeing… sometimes a way of not seeing.
Very freely inspired by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898
– I don’t see what you hear…
Where, just like Lucian, who is making a long journey, one may observe from afar a vibration whose frequency is not quite the usual one, a movement whose effect the body corrects without knowing why, a light that lasts a little less long, something glimpsed at the edge of vision that disappears when one turns one’s head…
Almost nothing, and yet the brain possesses this strange ability sometimes to retain that almost nothing without yet being able to explain it, Lucian thought, as though some part of him had already begun to suspect what the whole of him continued calmly to ignore.
Beneath the hull, the waves continued their slow thrust. The liner rose with them, sometimes so slightly that one might have believed so considerable a mass was not moving at all, then descended again, recovering all its weight, and the movement began over and over, while the water struck the bow, opened, ran along either side of the hull and came together again far astern in a long seam of foam which the wind almost immediately unstitched.
The body, meanwhile, had long since ceased to wait for thought to tell it how to respond to this oscillation. It learned the ship as one learns a new way of walking, through a multitude of corrections so slight that none deserved to be noticed: the ankles yielded a little, the pelvis compensated, the head sought to preserve its horizon, while deep within the ear an apparatus older than any instrument aboard continuously informed the brain of inclination, acceleration, the barely begun fall, and at every instant muscles contracted before the person whose balance they were saving had even become aware of the danger to which they were responding.
It could therefore happen that a body already knew something that the one who said I did not yet know.
Not because it possessed some mysterious hidden knowledge, but because its responses began before words, because sensation often preceded explanation and because balance, once threatened, corrected the world before thought had even formulated that it had just moved. Long before the sea could enter the hull, it thus entered the legs, the shoulders, the vertebrae, altered the points of support, wordlessly taught a way of yielding and recovering, so that the liner which was meant to keep the ocean outside already carried, within the slightest body standing upon its decks, a small part of its movement.
Speed itself had eventually come to be understood as a form of safety, since a fast-moving ship, it was said, could more easily escape whatever appeared before it… all that was required was for the obstacle to be seen early enough, for the rudder to respond quickly enough, for the engines to obey, for the sea to grant the space necessary for the manoeuvre; but all these conditions, because they were always repeated together and because not one of them had yet failed, gradually seemed to lose their character as conditions and merge with the general certainty that, whatever might happen, the liner would know how to find its way through.
Perhaps the first true danger lay precisely there, because as yet it resembled no danger at all… not the failure of a machine, but the continuous success of all the machines… not ignorance of danger, but a knowledge abundant enough to create the feeling that no danger could ever present itself except in one of the forms already known. It was not a matter of lacking the means to react, but of being convinced that their speed would always make it possible to postpone the moment of reacting.
The brain might experience a similar intoxication without ever naming it. What it correctly anticipated yesterday reinforces today’s anticipation… each success increases the weight of the expectation that follows, and repetition eventually cuts through uncertainty a road so familiar that everything seems destined to continue travelling along it. The faster recognition came, the less time remained to ask whether the thing recognised was truly the same… the more easily a situation could be placed among those already passed through, the less chance whatever resisted that resemblance had of reaching consciousness.
Speed, then, was not merely the amount of distance covered within a given time. It could become a way of seeing… sometimes a way of not seeing.
Very freely inspired by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898
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