a tale
He began life living on a chondrite meteor. How he came to be born, no one knows. But there he was one day, astride a meteor deep in space.
What is the nature of my existence, he asked. Here I am, one day awake and aware. I know not from where I came or what it is I am to do.
Looking around the meteor, he saw what he had always seen. The same landscape; the same ridges, valleys, and shadows. True, the distant scenery changed a little. Stars faded past into obscurity. New celestial bodies slowly came into view. The pinpoints of light changed their patterns, their positions altered, their brightness oscillated. And always he was beneath their brilliance and awed.
Time went on. His name was Alethe. He ate and drank and lived and grew and aged. His dreams were beautiful, terrible, meaningless, trivial, and vital. His fingers were his own, as were his thoughts. In his isolation he created friends, companions. With them he sought communion. In the valleys between the crested, stony ridges lived small insects. With them, too, he sought communion. Gazing into the multifaceted eyes of a dragonfly, he felt his spirit moving between his body and that of the winged insect and he felt the presence of the dragonfly moving in that same space.
He drank water from shallow, shaded pools and was thankful for his thirst. Once for a reason he could not name, he built a low wall of metallic stone. It stood for two days, a short, squat shadow on the landscape. He awoke during the night and walked out to where he had built the wall. Looking at it through the starlight, he suddenly felt regret and anger and remembered a dream he had tried to forget. He slowly took apart the wall, stone by stone. The stones were smooth and angular, like ice or some kind of deep hued glass or steel. A few were rough and full of conglomerates. They felt good on the skin of his hands. He tumbled the stones down the slope, where they scattered and nestled among other rocks.
Alethe slept and dreamed, ate, and drank the cool water from shadowy pools. His life went on. And then one day, for no apparent reason, he died.
The meteor still travels through space, on some uncalculated trajectory. The stars are bright and the nights cool.
-sw
What is the nature of my existence, he asked. Here I am, one day awake and aware. I know not from where I came or what it is I am to do.
Looking around the meteor, he saw what he had always seen. The same landscape; the same ridges, valleys, and shadows. True, the distant scenery changed a little. Stars faded past into obscurity. New celestial bodies slowly came into view. The pinpoints of light changed their patterns, their positions altered, their brightness oscillated. And always he was beneath their brilliance and awed.
Time went on. His name was Alethe. He ate and drank and lived and grew and aged. His dreams were beautiful, terrible, meaningless, trivial, and vital. His fingers were his own, as were his thoughts. In his isolation he created friends, companions. With them he sought communion. In the valleys between the crested, stony ridges lived small insects. With them, too, he sought communion. Gazing into the multifaceted eyes of a dragonfly, he felt his spirit moving between his body and that of the winged insect and he felt the presence of the dragonfly moving in that same space.
He drank water from shallow, shaded pools and was thankful for his thirst. Once for a reason he could not name, he built a low wall of metallic stone. It stood for two days, a short, squat shadow on the landscape. He awoke during the night and walked out to where he had built the wall. Looking at it through the starlight, he suddenly felt regret and anger and remembered a dream he had tried to forget. He slowly took apart the wall, stone by stone. The stones were smooth and angular, like ice or some kind of deep hued glass or steel. A few were rough and full of conglomerates. They felt good on the skin of his hands. He tumbled the stones down the slope, where they scattered and nestled among other rocks.
Alethe slept and dreamed, ate, and drank the cool water from shadowy pools. His life went on. And then one day, for no apparent reason, he died.
The meteor still travels through space, on some uncalculated trajectory. The stars are bright and the nights cool.
-sw
posted by matt iv at 11:44 AM
1 Comments:
Very beautiful and very sad.
Post a Comment
<< Home