PART II:
FUTURE PERFECT
“The future is just old age and illness and pain.... I must have peace and this is the only way.”
James Whale, film director, died May 29, 1957
Chapter 1
Somewhere in the dark, a spark is struck and Noah’s awareness blooms into existence. He finds himself floating in an empty vacuum; a tiny seedling in a black expanse. Alone, he spirals through space like Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, pivoting on his belly button to carve a perfectly spherical bubble out of the void around him.
Slowly, his arms and legs unfurl from their foetal coil. Fleshy tendrils creeping in search of light, they roll from his body to lie extended in the cardinal directions - sensory vanes on a human satellite. At their extremities, fingers and toes prickle faintly with pins and needles. As Noah’s elastic limbs become more leaden, floating is replaced by swimming. A bed of thick, crude jelly supports his elbows and knees, cushioning his head and cradling his body. Support is replaced by suction and the tarry substance becomes a restraint, pulling him softly down to Earth with irresistible force.
As gravity returns, so do other senses. A warm red glow spreads slowly across his closed eyelids like a low, late sunrise. The crimson horizon blossoms into a golden halo, punctuated with pinpricks of white heat. With agonising insistence, beads of light burrow their way through gummed lashes to stab at his awakening eyes.
“The word UTOPIA stands in common usage for the ultimate in human folly or human hope -- vain dreams of perfection in a Never-Never Land or rational efforts to remake man’s environment and his institutions and even his own erring nature, so as to enrich the possibilities of the common life. Sir Thomas More, the coiner of this word, was aware of both implications... In his little verse he explained that utopia might refer either to the Greek ‘eutopia’, which means the good place, or to ‘outopia’, which means no place.” Lewis Mumford, 1922
YOU ARE READING
The Fall of Man
General FictionSo much for an easy way to go. After thirty nine long years, each squandered day chained inexorably and uneventfully to the next, this is how it ends. How appropriate. Blinking back tears, Joanna shakes out another handful of pills into the palm of...
