Jan 12 21
1850: In a tavern overlooking a particular narrows of the Potomac River, two Imps of the Perverse sit facing each other. Cloistered from the misty afternoon outside, they are volleying passages from Emerson’s Self-Reliance. The subject matter, too ambitious, oft ambles and yields to topicality, settling on the impending Civil War.
1910: A young French captain, Paul Balduin, of the river steamship, Fidèle, docks in a port along the Vltava River, Prague. While on brief leave, a stowaway lodges in his cabin. The young man is an exasperated philosophy student, Matthew Leggatt. It is only when the ship returns to sail that the lodger makes his presence known. Balduin motivated by the loneliness of his rank, entertains the uncommonly existential Student of Prague. As the ship passes under the Charles Bridge, Legatt murders Balduin and kills himself.
2021: Dr. Circe Narcissopoulos sits high on a rocky bank of the Haliacmon river. She is intently looking at the other side. A structural physicist, she has been hired to consult about a new bridge. She muses on the remote bridges over jungle streams, the great Verrazano, providential ones made by fallen trees, the wildly far off Magellanic Bridge, the gene bridges stringing through generations and even tunnels. Her tendency towards poetic rumination, her unbridled receptivity and her ambition, stir in her a rejection of concrete conveyance and physical transit. She spends the remainder of her life calculating a riddle of how to make both banks the same while keeping the river intact. In 2045 she wins the Nobel prize for her work in practicable telepathy.
1910: A young French captain, Paul Balduin, of the river steamship, Fidèle, docks in a port along the Vltava River, Prague. While on brief leave, a stowaway lodges in his cabin. The young man is an exasperated philosophy student, Matthew Leggatt. It is only when the ship returns to sail that the lodger makes his presence known. Balduin motivated by the loneliness of his rank, entertains the uncommonly existential Student of Prague. As the ship passes under the Charles Bridge, Legatt murders Balduin and kills himself.
2021: Dr. Circe Narcissopoulos sits high on a rocky bank of the Haliacmon river. She is intently looking at the other side. A structural physicist, she has been hired to consult about a new bridge. She muses on the remote bridges over jungle streams, the great Verrazano, providential ones made by fallen trees, the wildly far off Magellanic Bridge, the gene bridges stringing through generations and even tunnels. Her tendency towards poetic rumination, her unbridled receptivity and her ambition, stir in her a rejection of concrete conveyance and physical transit. She spends the remainder of her life calculating a riddle of how to make both banks the same while keeping the river intact. In 2045 she wins the Nobel prize for her work in practicable telepathy.