Desert Flowers
Of all the environments on Earth, the desert seems the least hospitable to life. It’s hot and dry, and unprotected things do not survive. Because we know that deserts exist, we have a keener measure of the value of our lives. And because life is often difficult in patches, like the traversal of a desert, we have a great, romantic metaphor with which to better understand the difficulty in our lives. That there should ever be flowers in a desert, seems outrageous and inspirational in the extreme. Flowers are pretty. Flowers are frivolous and temporal. Flowers bear no responsibility, save for the inescapable requirement that they compel us to wake up and smell them.
Metropolis
It gratifies us as a species to imagine we are sitting atop some sort of summit. We use words like evolution to describe ourselves and our path as biological organisms. We use words like progress to describe our civilization and all the things we’ve made together as a group. If we are always improving upon our own lesser forms and if we are always achieving to an unprecedented degree, then predicting the future is a matter of simple extrapolation. “C” is always (and never more than) a rational, predictable expression of “AB”. And yet, our expeditions of Tomorrow never fail to terrify us. Whatever beauty or transcendance we may imagine there, the Future is always host to something we know we’ll regret. We may go faster, burn brighter, fly higher… but, alas, we can never escape ourselves.
