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Monday, 25 April 2005
Venice and a meteor ::
Between movies in San Francisco today, I had dinner with D and R and a couple who are their friends; they’d run into each other at the theater.
I was very quiet as they caught up on their travels to see eclipses, and spoke of how they all would like to visit Italy, and then the conversation lingered on how Venice is sinking.
Later, D mentioned how, on the eclipse cruise ship they were on last month, an astronomer had been giving a lecture and interrupted it to propose to his girlfriend. Then there was a story of a mutual friend who was an astronomer who proposed to his now-wife, also an astronomer, in a much more romantic way. He’d reserved time on the 200-inch Palomar telescope one night during a lunar eclipse, picked up his girlfriend in San Diego and brought her to Mount Palomar, where during the dark of the eclipse, he’d aimed the telescope at a distant polar-ring galaxy and told her this was the biggest ring he could find.
And then there was the story of how D and R’s friend R had proposed to his wife, lying on their backs outside on a hot, cloudy night in Phoenix, when the clouds parted just enough for them to see a meteor streaking down. He took that as a sign and popped the question.
Curiously enough, this morning I happened to read exactly two old entries here: one about how Venice is sinking and another about seeing a meteor. In the past I might have seen this as some kind of omen, and attached a desired “form factor” to it. But now I’d like to see this as a reminder that things are more intricately and deeply interconnected then we usually comprehend. It might feel like “magic,” or more simply, a sense of marvel at a series of events that suggests that the universe is not necessarily as chaotic and purposeless and entropic as it might appear.
On a more somber note, during the first film, there were some shots taken on very fast train crossing the Japanese countryside. I found myself wondering how often those trains crash. I got home around midnight, looked at Yahoo News, and found out there’d just been a derailment killing 49 people (OK, it was a commuter train and not a bullet train between cities like the one I’d been wondering about).
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