Letters From the Future

Dear John . . .

“There’s no such thing as a black hole,” he said,

“It’s just a theory, and there’ll never be a way to prove it. A compact mass with an ‘event horizon’ that even light can’t escape from? That sucks everything into it and compresses it into nothing? Pah! There’s no such thing!”

It wasn’t that I disagreed with him, but he was looking at it all wrong. It’s not in outer space, and you don’t need the Hubble Telescope to look for the signs. The Black Hole is all around us every day. I see our words, our art, our music, our traditions sliding inexorably to the “event horizon,” also known as the internet.

Most people know something’s wrong,

but they can’t put their finger on it. Many people say that every day seems like the same day, that we are all stuck in the movie “Groundhog Day,” in which the same day repeats over and over. What most people don’t see is that everything is continually disappearing around them. News articles, movies, TV shows, music, art, emails, social media . . . it’s all on the internet. And no matter what happens—no matter how outrageous—within a few days it disappears and the slate is blank again, ready for the next big nothing.

But there are some of us who have not yet reached the deadly “event horizon” and don’t intend to ever do so . . .

We know the dangers of electronic information,

of emails that disappear, of bank accounts that are frozen when one misbehaves, of tragedies and comedies and love affairs that are here today and gone and forgotten tomorrow. We know, because they just keep sliding away, sliding toward the “event horizon” that eventually sucks them all into the Black Hole, and they disappear forever.

There was a time when words and events were more concrete, though. They could not disappear with the click of a mouse . . .

There was a time when all of us were record-keepers,

chronicling our lives on paper with our own hand and reading about the lives of others. It was a time when there was a special drawer in the dresser set aside for the many letters that came in over the years, the memories that people sent to us because we were important to them. Because they wanted us to know about their lives and current events, and they wanted to hear about ours. There were letters of tragedies and victories, of births and deaths and marriages, and each line held great meaning and emotion—and we could read them and re-experience them over and over again.

There was a time when nations were built and destroyed,

and historians wrote it down. Could they have lied? No doubt some of them did. But the event itself stayed on the timeline. It was real, even if the details were smudged a bit. It didn’t disappear. There was no “event horizon” sucking it in . . .

And there was art, beautiful art—

paintings and sculptures and architecture. Music and symphonies and plays and novels and poems. They were tangible. They were real. They recorded who we were as a people, where we’d come from and where we hoped to go. Because where there is art, there is hope.

There were love letters

secretly handed to a paramour. There were obituaries somberly announced in newspapers. There was investigative journalism and scientific inquiry meticulously documented in glossy pages of magazines and journals.

And it was all lovingly chronicled. All of it—even the outrage. And you could return to it again and again if you chose. You could use it as a reference point or a launching pad. It was solid and real. It was on paper with words penned by human hands, not digital bytes momentarily flashing across a black mirror.

The choice has always been ours, and it still is.

You can stay in a world where everything unfailingly slips toward the “event horizon” and disappears into the Black Hole of the internet, including yourself. Or you can step away now while it’s still possible. With pen or paintbrush or clay or harmonica in hand, you can walk away and reinvent the world again. You can still do that.

Start with a letter to a long-lost friend. Read a paper book. Buy your groceries in person. Become part of the world again. Write letters. Many, many letters.

Oh, and by the way, in 2018 astronomers saw a Black Hole shredding a star and consuming it in a galaxy 665 million light years away from Earth. Then three years later, it ejected the material, which traveled at half the speed of light and somehow managed to escape the “event horizon” on the way out. Yet oddly enough, they still remain stumped by the Moon.

Watch out for that “event horizon.” *sigh*

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If you’d like a glimpse into my past, please check out “The Plain Maine Cookbook.” There’s a lot more in it than just vintage Maine recipes. Get a firsthand look into my past and how I got from there to here . . .

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