Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "He that has no fools, knaves or beggars in his family, was begot by a flash of lightning." - English proberb

Reading: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines

Listening to: Tom Waits, Blood Money

Decluttering accomplishments: handled about half the scraps of paper that had been littering my living room

2 February 2003 - Spacemen's Bethel

I was going to write about wind chill factor and briefing charts, of the discovery that the ABC store in Vienna, Virginia is the first place I've found in the U.S. that sells amarula (a South African liqueur I like a great deal), in short, of the minutiae of my day to day life. But sometimes it's the news that's more newsworthy.

In the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, there is a famous church called the Seamen's Bethel. It's famous mostly because it's the church in Moby Dick, the one with the altar in the shape of ship's bow. Not only did Ishmael go there before setting off to go a-whaling, but damn near every person who goes to New Bedford stops in for a look.

The architecture is interesting enough, but if you stay a few minutes more, you can read the plaques on the walls. Plaques in honor of the dead. Ships lost at sea, for generations and generations. The most striking thing is the dates. They're not all decades ago. Ships are still lost at sea, going down with all hands.

It's less frequent now than it was in the days when Daniel Defoe scribbled his name beneath the names of ships written on the walls of Lloyd's Coffee House in London, taking on insurance for the cargo. (That coffee house turned into the famous Lloyd's of London and those scribbles on the wall became underwriting.) In Defoe's era (17th century for those keeping count) setting out to sea was a very risky enterprise and nobody was surprised at the casualties.

Still, men set out to sea. For profit, for adventure, to fill that human craving to explore. The shores are mapped these days and those who want new vistas must look upwards. And so the era of sail has tranformed to the age of the sky.

It is no surprise that tragedies will happen. Is it worth the cost? There is no machine comparable to the human eye and the human brain. Even if we could build machines to run all the science experiments of that last mission, there is no machine that could communicate the poetry of the planet below. Machines cannot die, but they are not enough.

So let us pray and remember and investigate and find a way to set out again And let us add another plaque to the wall of the Spacemen's Bethel.