Yesterday, they discovered that dinosaur skeletons have expanded over time as they reacted with chemicals in the earth, that they had once belonged to animals as small as birds - fierce, wingless birds, like toothy dodos. In fact, the whole earth had once been small, smaller than the moon (and had revolved around the moon), a Little-Prince-sized planet that creatures our size could have seen the curve of, could have jogged around for a morning constitutional.
However, a dissenting opinion suggests that the planet is still this size, and that dinosaur skeletons never expanded, that they are still as big as birds were a moment ago (evolutionarily speaking), only modern day birds have become smaller as they adapted to what is still a Little-Prince-sized planet. For this to be the case, we’d have to be miniscule, the size of insects, which would explain our feelings of inadequacy.
Try this experiment at home: submerge a chicken bone in a large vat of vinegar for several million years. Watch it grow. Please perform this experiment with friends. It is not right for human beings to be alone, a race of shut-ins communicating exclusively by means of computerized surrogates. Our planet is still small. If you stand on the beach, you can still see the curve of it. In a billion years our bones will be huge. Beings known as AHIMIHA will pilot their flivvers through the vaulted tunnels of our rib cages on sunny afternoons in their national parks.
It is like a carousel, an intricate old structure you come across by accident in the park and feel nostalgic for, though you don’t know why since you’ve always felt nostalgic for it but cannot remember a time when you loved it for itself only, so you pay your dime and you get on and the music is haunting and the horses bob up and down and go around and around and the other children seem pleased enough, though distracted, but also content to go around and around seeing the same popcorn stand, the same wrought iron bench, the same lamppost over and over again, and the overall effect is slightly disorienting, slightly interesting even but not quite as climactic as you would have liked, and just as the motion is slowing down a little and the music is growing fainter and the carousel is about to cease from turning, you realize that it was the horses, the eyes of the horses that disturbed you: upturned, slightly bloodshot, frozen with panic over the weight of the riders on their backs and the poles going through their stomachs and the reverberating music, which must be incomprehensible to them. You never imagined it would have real horses, you think, and why didn’t you notice until now, and then it comes to a stop.
The death of modern literature and I walked side by side by the canal but didn’t hold hands. The death of modern literature was in her own world and looked down at her clogs as they kicked green clots of cut grass, and I was in my own, thinking about school starting in the fall and whether I would be staying in the Portuguese house again. There was a resident there who thought that I had said something insulting to him or that I thought I was better than him, which I didn’t think at all, and I was sure he was trying to have me barred. Suddenly we came upon a man on the path who had fallen off his bicycle and was tangled up in it, examining his skinned knees and elbows. The death of modern literature dropped to her knees beside him and said comforting things to him in a soft voice, whereas I stood apart, looking at the two of them. The man was an old pious man, and I thought he would be embarrassed by her attention but he wasn’t, and she took him down to the edge of the canal to wash, and the water was brown, so I thought it might not be a good idea to wash open cuts with it, but she did. Something about seeing her squat next to him in her army pants made me change my mind and I crumpled up the note that was in my pocket. Dear death of modern literature, I thought, I guess we will be going out for another semester.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.2.