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Windriven's avatar

What a shame traveling fourteen hours give or take just to end up on the Amalfi. The good news is that you're a stone's throw from Pompei, a must see if you haven't already. Kiss the bride and make your excuses. Or shoot on down to Palermo or better still to Naxos or one of the other small towns on the east coast of Sicily. Just up the coast from Naxos in Taormina, Mark Knopfler gave a bitching concert about a decade ago. If you go out late at night you can still hear his guitar dancing along the waves.

You and I fish for different reasons. Or maybe not. I go for quiet contemplation. The smell of the water, the breeze, the deafening roar of nature that passes for something like silence in juxtaposition to the city. I muse about what it means to be a human being in the 21st century, about whether ours is a failing species, about whether or not it very much matters.

Many many years ago I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in its theatrical release. Not long before I had seen a Richard Widmark western. Not long after I spent an afternoon "fishing" in a Canadian provincial park, contemplating the arcs of the two protagonists lives.

Ours is a funny species. Queer funny, not haha funny. The same organ that composed Saint-Saens Third Symphony also devised the Final Solution. The same species that produced Florence Nightingale also produced Charles Manson. On doesn't find such radically different expressions in other species. Some members are more dominant than others, some more nurturing, some more clever. But nothing like humans. I posit that this owes to other species being tightly constrained by genetics while the genetic accident of (relatively speaking) extreme intelligence makes the achingly slow machine of genetic variance superficially unimportant in modern humans. Instead, the frenetic pace of memetic software updates drives change at an ever accelerating pace. We have reshaped our environment to suit us and our every whim. In that way we are gods. But we are gods mired in adolescence, sixteen-year-olds in daddy's Lambo, 700 bhp at our command. We have not yet learned that having all that the power is the smaller part of the problem.

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Paul Elliott's avatar

Lovely column. It was new to me so I'm glad I got read it. And the bonus track was, well, a nice bonus (both the imagery and the music).

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