We got in last night about midnight. The ferry across from St Thomas was plain and simple. We observed many of the local people who sometimes sat taciturn and vacant or idly chatting like anyone on their daily commute — as if it were any bus or subway. Intermingled with these locals — jet black of skin — and speaking a melodic creole only partially comprehensible — sat others sharing this ride across moonlit waters between Red Hook, St. Thomas and Cruz Bay, St. John at 11 pm. a few others like us, lucky tourists, just coming in from the airport to our villas or resorts.
Looking out through the Plexiglas window slid back halfway — a rhombus bisected vertically into two asymmetrical trapezoids — through which could be seen mellow humps I later learned were called Great St. James and Little St. James Islands, Dog Island and other small uninhabited extrusions from the winedark sea, the surface of which was, at this time, bespectacled with an infinite shimmering of the moonlight.
The moonbeams threaded their way between these as yet nameless islands and cays through the limitless expanse of space from the moon hung in the inky sky, across the rippling water, reflecting as if by chance to our admiring eyes.
This led me to ask Anita if she believed in fate. “If you mean whatever it was that brought us together — then you bet I do. ” was her answer. It was a series of events which would have been difficult to believe had we been told by a fortune teller when we were both fourteen how and where we would meet.
I even wrote a song about it. Of course it had to be a country song, when a verse like this actually describes how you met:
“…then one day in Dallas, I met a young lady, with love in her eyes and stars in her hair, I’ll never forget what I felt when I saw her, what I said to myself when we met way down there”
But let me leave that story for another time. What I meant included that, but also much, much more. Our destinies are all complex and deep and in the fathoming — humbling. The question of fate is really tied up with another — the question of time. What is time? Where is it? Where does it go?
Our lives are so short, and eternity so long, how can we “not be” for practically all of it, and “be” just for a mere instant?
And all we are and do — all our actions, their consequences, our loves and accomplishments are like the dance of a lightning bug all of whose cares and passions span no more than a summer’s lingering gloaming.
And yet, and yet. Our consciousness can grasp the infinite — can span time — and I believe, can get glimpses of a world outside of time. So, what is it? Where does time go when it’s gone? Where are our old friends, and our yesterdays? And more to the point, where does it come from? Where are the moments yet to be?
…
Some people think there is very little we cannot understand, with sufficient abstraction, with appropriate frameworks. In contrast I believe that the universe is so vast and unfathomable that we are capable of only grasping a fraction of it — in proportion as our lives’ duration is to eternity — so our comprehension is to reality.
…
And yet, and yet. Imagine if we could completely describe the world, somehow. If we could completely define even just one single moment. How many different moments have there been, or will there yet be? How many moments might there yet be, which will never come to pass? How many others might there have been, but which for us, never were?
…
But for us, there is only one moment. This one. The eternal moment, that is, is here, is here now. There is only one. Yet the moment in which you read these words will be different from the one in which I write them.
This is for me the mystery of time. How can there be only one eternally present moment in time, and yet many different instants?
I say that this is merely a limitation of our conceptual apparatus. that is, we are built to see the world a certain way, and we can only rarely, as if in our peripheral vision, get a glimpse of another mode of perception. Sometimes great thinkers come along and change our view of the world permanently, adding to our vocabulary and providing the rest of us as rational beings with the tools to understand the world in a new way.
…
But there is not a culture in the history of the planet, not an individual, who has never had the feeling that there is more — much more going on than we can grasp. Yet we doubt our intuition, especially in this rational era, as unconventional, “unscientific.”
Like the cave man’s wife said to her husband: “Gor! Stop playing around with that flint and go out hunting like the rest of the cavemen!”
Conventional thinking is usually right. That is why we have conventions. And by the same token, unconventional people are usually wrong. But thankfully, they are not always wrong, or we would never get anywhere.
And so fate is our path through this enormous space of possible moments, perceptions of which make up our sense of reality, of what is, and what might be. It is our consciousness which travels along this path and in some sense all of our choices, past, present and future — lie out there in potentiality. Yet our consciousness only perceives one. This one, this one moment.
It is as if we are looking at the world, its vistas and panoramas, through a cardboard tube. We can only see a tiny fraction of its entirety and as we turn our heads, we see the next portion and the next, each one adjacent to the last.
Yet as we traverse the horizon, say, we miss the stars in the sky, and as we look at the stars, we miss those stars in our lover’s eye.
So it was written in the stars that Anita and I should meet in Dallas. And has this moonlight has been waiting for all eternity to twinkle in our eyes just now?
Does it not yet wait for us to return? Are we not still there, even now, making way through the warm, black and sparkling Caribbean water?