Exerpt from Neal Stephenson's Novel, 'Quicksilver'
One cannot board a ship without imagining ship-wreck. Daniel envisions it as being like an opera, lasting several hours and proceeding through a series of Acts.
Act I: The hero rises to clear skies and smooth sailing. The sun is following a smooth and well-understood celestial curve, the sea is a plane, sailors are strumming guitars and carving objets d'art, while erudite passengers take the air and muse about grand philosophical schemes.
Act II: A change in the weather is predicted based on readings in the captain's barometer. Hours later it appears in the distance, a formation of clouds that is observed, sketched, analyzed, and analyzed. Sailors cheerfully prepare for the weather.
Act III: The storm hits. Changes are noted on the barometer, thermometer, clinometer, compass, and other instruments--celestial bodies are, however, no longer visible--the sky is a boiling chaos torn unpredictably by bolts--the sea is rough, the ship heaves, the cargo remains tied safely down, but most passengers are too ill or worried to think. The sailors are all working without rest--some of them sacrifice chickens in the hopes of appeasing their gods. The rigging glows with St. Elmo's fire--this is attributed to supernatural forces.
Act IV: The masts snap and the rudder goes missing. There is panic. Lives are already being lost, but it is not known how many. Cannons and casks are careering randomly about, making it impossible to guess who'll be alive and who dead ten seconds from now. The compass, barometer, et cetera, are all destroyed and the record of their readings swept overboard--maps dissolve--sailors are helpless--those who are still alive and sentient can think of nothing to do but pray.
Act V: The ship is no more. Survivors cling to casks and planks, fighting off the less fortunate and leaving them to drown. Everyone has reverted to a feral state of terror and misery. Huge waves shove them around without any pattern, carnivorous fish use living persons as food. There is no relief in sight, or even imaginable.
Men of his generation* were born during Act V and raised in act IV. As students, they huddled in a small vulnerable bubble of Act III. The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of its history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feat of assembling splintered planks afloat a stormy sea ito a saling-ship and then, having climbed onboard it, building instruments with which to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those measurements. When they were at Cambridge, Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.
But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true--that the world had once been a splendid orderly place--that humans had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.
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* In England, the Civil War that brought Cromwell to power, and on the Continent, the Thiry Years' War.
[Stolen from a friend's FB page. I'm sure neither he nor Neal would mind.]
Act I: The hero rises to clear skies and smooth sailing. The sun is following a smooth and well-understood celestial curve, the sea is a plane, sailors are strumming guitars and carving objets d'art, while erudite passengers take the air and muse about grand philosophical schemes.
Act II: A change in the weather is predicted based on readings in the captain's barometer. Hours later it appears in the distance, a formation of clouds that is observed, sketched, analyzed, and analyzed. Sailors cheerfully prepare for the weather.
Act III: The storm hits. Changes are noted on the barometer, thermometer, clinometer, compass, and other instruments--celestial bodies are, however, no longer visible--the sky is a boiling chaos torn unpredictably by bolts--the sea is rough, the ship heaves, the cargo remains tied safely down, but most passengers are too ill or worried to think. The sailors are all working without rest--some of them sacrifice chickens in the hopes of appeasing their gods. The rigging glows with St. Elmo's fire--this is attributed to supernatural forces.
Act IV: The masts snap and the rudder goes missing. There is panic. Lives are already being lost, but it is not known how many. Cannons and casks are careering randomly about, making it impossible to guess who'll be alive and who dead ten seconds from now. The compass, barometer, et cetera, are all destroyed and the record of their readings swept overboard--maps dissolve--sailors are helpless--those who are still alive and sentient can think of nothing to do but pray.
Act V: The ship is no more. Survivors cling to casks and planks, fighting off the less fortunate and leaving them to drown. Everyone has reverted to a feral state of terror and misery. Huge waves shove them around without any pattern, carnivorous fish use living persons as food. There is no relief in sight, or even imaginable.
Men of his generation* were born during Act V and raised in act IV. As students, they huddled in a small vulnerable bubble of Act III. The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of its history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feat of assembling splintered planks afloat a stormy sea ito a saling-ship and then, having climbed onboard it, building instruments with which to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those measurements. When they were at Cambridge, Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.
But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true--that the world had once been a splendid orderly place--that humans had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.
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* In England, the Civil War that brought Cromwell to power, and on the Continent, the Thiry Years' War.
[Stolen from a friend's FB page. I'm sure neither he nor Neal would mind.]