Meanwhile

Where, meanwhile… Félix, too, in his own way, travels… a journey of which one no longer quite knows whether it is the journey itself or Félix who is moving…

Where we learn that Lucian’s ocean liner therefore continued to move forward, its bow parting the water with such unwavering regularity that it seemed less to force its way through it than to open it, while, far below the decks, the engines ceaselessly sustained the thrust that sent the whole mass gliding out towards the open sea.

Little by little, the kilometres unravelled behind it along with the hours, and what was now expected of such a crossing was what had already come to be expected of trains linking one city to another: no longer merely that it should reach its destination, but that it should obey a duration, allow itself to be entered into a timetable, that the ocean itself, after having imposed for centuries its slownesses, its detours and its delays, should at last consent to become a measurable distance.

It was no longer merely space that one claimed in this way to reduce, but something more difficult still to grasp, since time stretched nowhere before the bow and no gaze could watch it recede behind the stern. And yet it had to be there, since it could be counted, since one could lose it, gain it, save a few hours of it as one saved coal or steam, and thus the journey ended by giving this formless thing the appearance of a substance which the power of the machines might likewise be capable of overcoming.

The other architecture had always performed an even stranger operation. It possessed no inner dial upon which time might pass with the regularity of a hand, and yet it knew how to wait, to anticipate, to recognise that something had lasted too long or scarcely long enough; it could compress several years into the flash of a memory and turn a handful of seconds into an almost interminable expanse when the body was waiting for something whose outcome it did not know. The time it inhabited was therefore not exactly that of chronometers… it bent itself to attention, to waiting, to fear, to desire, to the number of events retained, and perhaps it was precisely for this reason that it could seem so natural to believe that by increasing speed one reduced the journey, when all one was still doing was reducing the number of hours inscribed between two points.

The body, for its part, would continue to receive each of the waves… the gaze, each of the darknesses.

And something, perhaps, would retain the trace of whatever, in a timetable, counted for nothing.

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