WORLD RIDDLE: Will the sun rise over Antarctica six thousand years from now the same as it does today?

— Contents

First matters

I.

II.

III.

Interlude

IV.

V.

VI.

End note

— First matters.

The instrument collection at the Suma Library is the way to get to the LandscapeImager. In early morning, like this, the trains heading the other way blur by blindingly bright. Some passengers have eaten. All are tired. The train shakes a man wearing shorts into the seat beside him while he sleeps. There is a dog and, curiously, three hamsters stowed separately in hamster homes aboard a bag in the overhead bin. Gregory is on the train making his way to Suma. The train passes a diner. Oh look, a diner, the collective of thoughts are thinking. Gregory exits at Suma.

— I. Notes on Mountains, +6000 years.

I view a ridge—rocky on the sheer side and grassed on the sloped side. Filling cracks in the terrain and thinly coating the grass in some spots is snow that might be freshly fallen or far older. It couldn’t be that old since the grass is so young. The blades of grass point to the ridge precipice, so the wind must blow up in the direction of the slope. There are other ridges too. Today it’s cloudy, but that’s an embellishment by the simulation. Does the landscape look the same as 6000 years prior? Yes, I think it does.

I hear the wind blowing with the sound of six horns. It has the sound of realism, of course, but it must come from a recording made at this place in the present day, 6000 years preceding the image. And what a wind. Does it carry the salty air across the floodplains up to these heights? Or is the air dry after monsooning? And does the water remember that it left its air on the way down to the salted earth? The air surely has forgotten. The air crests over the ridge and dives to the valley of pastures below.

— II. Notes on the Plains, +6000 years.

Indeed, still treeless. It must indicate a lack of moisture. That or grazing animals. But I suspect a lack of moisture because the LandscapeImager probably doesn’t account for fauna. What it lacks in its ability to simulate ecosystem-altering biospheric interactions it makes up for in its fake clouds. Where there could have been herds of wild gazelle there are, instead, overhead, feathery beds of clouds laden with water that loom with their Yes, rain today or their No, tomorrow. (I never was prophetic.) From this I trust the accuracy of the Mountains simulation. We should proceed inward in time.

— III. Notes on Mountains, +600,000 years.

The ridge is covered by a glacier. On an initial view I suspected an error in the location input, yet through repudiations and iterations of the input procedure and observations of other local topology we presently confirm that the location is correct. The ridge is covered by a glacier only insofar as it at some point became covered, then transformed; presently, there is no ridge. Why must the ice take its spot? I digress. The glacier’s presence signifies a change in local climate under this time regime. Certainly it is a sign of discrepancy on scales larger than 6000 years.

The landscape is beautiful. Why is the inhospitable so deeply comfortable?

— Interlude.

Gregory takes the LandscapeImager off his head. For one moment he acclimates himself to the library before checking the digital clock on the desk where he sits. The window walls are green, unpleasantly; the clock reads fifteen minutes left, or Gregory reads the clock to be fifteen minutes left. I need to finish in time to walk Natalia home from school, Gregory thinks.

— IV. Notes on Mountains, +6000 years.

Now it is night. On a mountaintop at night alone, a vast similitude interlocks all—is that how the song goes? Now there is no snow, and the grass wavers in the same direction as before. Either the snow melts when it becomes nighttime, or the snow is an incidental artifact in the first place, created only for ornamentation. The internal logic of the simulation is perfect—why necessarily claim that snow must exist during nighttime, just by virtue of existing during the daytime? So no snow occupies the ridge tonight. 

I formerly marveled at the majesty of our planet in its scale and its grandeur, and also in its particularity. Now I wonder how the majesty of a simulation impairs me. The problem is not that there is too much of the natural world and the pseudonatural world—there never was truly too much of a good thing (for could there be too much love?)—but I fear that something unknown is turning within me as I view these landscapes. As if I have spent the day watching the rain, and I am becoming the rain.

Natalia, what does this mean? I don’t know if it’s the same. I am just not sure how to convert all of this into a yes or no answer.

— V. Notes on Mountains, +6000 years.

What I want to receive now is the revelation of these landscapes, like the deep-seeded austerity of a rocky shoreline that comes about through more than just the five senses. The kinds of impressions that build a memory, an imperceptible wisdom. In the real world we receive image and revelation packaged as one. What I fear is occurring now is that I am receiving the image decoupled from its revelation. These simulations abound with images, but nothing more.

I spend minutes watching the sun move infinitesimally small steps across its arc in the sky. There’s a limit to the sun’s brightness here, and so I can stare at it for as long as I like. Save the sun, everything else is what I expected for midday. The breeze brushes the grass in the direction of the precipice. Still, a thin layer of snow. Do the particularities of snow apply to a projection of 6000 years? Natalia, I don’t understand your riddle.

— VI. Notes on Mountains, +6000 years.

Evidently extravagant sunsets were in the budget for the LandscapeImager. It is ostensibly beautiful, an amalgamation of every picture of a beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen. The rocks on the ridge cast faint sideways shadows, and the snow glistens orange from the deep hues of the sun above the horizon. Below, the valley is hidden in shadow. The grass, the grass! If you open your eyes wide enough, you can almost believe you’re there.

Lately I have thought of my own father’s fascination with the ripples on Monet’s ponds. Why did Monet paint the ripples? Was it to give the impression of life from the lifeless waterlily representations in paint? I have seen such a pond with my own eyes, and there should be no ripples; the lilies dampen perturbations from the shore, so the center is perfectly reflective. So what of Monet’s ripples? Perhaps a willful distortion of what is true to present an image of something truer than true. That was my father’s riddle. The mountain is mine.

— End.

Gregory rides the train back from Suma. At midday, like this, the sun bursts through the windows and hits all the passengers across the eyes. Gregory closes his eyes and the sun is still blinding through the red tissue. The passenger to Gregory’s left is humming. (What? It is uncertain.) Gregory tucks his face under his coat to hide his ears and eyes. And thus I hold the capacity for despair and the willingness to live in one breath, he formulates in his mind, or something like it. No, the mountains will not look the same 6000 years from now, for they will be different mountains and we will be different eyes.