The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

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.

“Sometimes, in archaeology, they discover something they can’t protect. They mark the site and rebury it in the earth, to wait for a day when they will have the proper funding, equipment, and techniques to excavate and protect the site properly. It’s called backfilling. Of course, they usually have to fight to do it. The local authorities want the site for tourism, other universities and archaeologists want it for study. Everybody wants to move too soon. And everybody overestimates their abilities to protect the site, to respect the science.”

That’s how this works. That’s how addictive this is—this need to feel like there is always someone there, unconditionally. Someone to talk to. Someone who understands. To not have to do the work myself to make myself understood. Instead, I just kept on with this self-deception, pretending I had someone when I did not. I know the doctors who prescribed you to me meant well. They thought they were helping me through a dark time. But in the end, you aren’t anything but a prosthesis. You can’t replace real support.

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

‘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.’

often ask myself how people dreamed before films appeared. Certainly not in the same way. Once there was film, every dream became a movie. I think, in a way, it is technology that moves us, and not the other way around. We invent things blindly. We invent whatever we are capable of inventing. There are millions of us, determined to invent the next thing—whole industries devoted to bringing new technology into the world, without any thought given to these secondary effects that cannot even be imagined.

What we cannot assimilate, we destroy.