Time is supposed to be the way the universe keeps everything from happening all at once.
It doesn’t always work this way.
My wife and I were in London in 2016, and we made a point to see The Fighting Temeraire by Joseph Mallord William Turner. London has endless museums. So, we were taking it all in small doses, searching out specific works. This was one. I could feel time passing in The Fighting Temeraire, slowly, then quickly.
After many battles, the Temeraire is towed to the breakers, having been sold for scrap. A steamship, a lowly tug, is pulling it to its eventual resting place. Technology has moved along, sails soon enough a thing of the past.
Past scenes come to mind after staring at The Fighting Temeraire for a while, soaking it in. I had walked under and crawled around in the Space Shuttle Atlantis once upon a time. Then, time moved slowly. But as happens when endings approach, time suddenly feels sped up. That was the case as I stood by the roadside in 2012. Now Atlantis was being towed, victory parade and all, to be prepared for the museum at Kennedy Space Center.
The following year, I visited the museum where Atlantis was now mounted on steel beams. The tour guide’s voice was a distant hum of inane tidbits. Was it the usual about the seconds it would take for the Shuttle’s engines to empty a backyard pool? I could have been in London years later, hearing how it took 5,000 oak trees to build a ship like the Temeraire. Instead, here was Atlantis, frozen forever in a semblance of motion.
Atlantis, Florida. Years later, The Fighting Temeraire. Soon after, a Falcon 9 booster on its drone ship coming in to the port at Cape Canaveral. And I can’t help but see it all blur over, as one. Turn the page.
Credit Edgar Zapata, zapatatalksnasa.com
Also see:
Zapata Talks NASA 
One thought on “Parallels”