The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

Mínervudóttir-Chan had answered, “The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

I believe the first aliens we encounter will rise to greet us from the sea.

Death is a part of us. It shapes our bodies from the very beginning. You might think your fingers are formed by the division of cells in the womb—but that is not the case. Fingers are chiseled out of a paddle of flesh by the death of cells, the same way David was chiseled by his sculptor from a block of marble. Without death, life would have no shape at all.

That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices.

‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.’ I think often of that quote. Is it not so? Each new technology carries unexpected consequences.

“Every one of these new things we build shapes our lives, carries consequences. But we can’t stop inventing, can we? We are compelled to invent. It is written into our DNA. Man is the technological animal. Invention is what has gotten us this far, made us the masters of this planet. But it is also what traps us. It is a compulsion. We cannot stop, no matter what the consequences.