I have a number of persistent and unaccountable fears. They’re not the sorts of wake-in-the-night-screaming terrors that might pose any real problems with my day-to-day life, just these sort of background doubts that make me think twice before I do anything. Some are fairly trivial, though they could very well become near-manic issues with enough provocation.
Having read, and likely misunderstood, an enormous number of articles on physics as a child, I became fascinated with the idea that gravity was apparently not sufficient to collapse the universe back in on itself. Rather than fear the eventual total heat death scenario that this paints for our universe, my mind somehow hopscotched across the vast realms of impossibility and decided that the one thing I should internalise and fear forever is the idea that somewhere, somehow, gravity will unaccountably invert and I will find myself flung from the earth, or perhaps clinging to some tree being slowly wrenched from the earth. Even if you somehow managed to hold on, I suppose there’d be no atmosphere. Lose-lose.
The reason I’m writing this post isn’t because of the fear of gravitational inversion, powerful and all as that is. Instead, this post was precipitated by a problem with public transportation. At some stage in the last few months, I found myself disembarking from a Luas on an overcast autumn afternoon. I glanced down the length of the road toward O’Connell Street, buildings leaning out over the road and tram tracks dull brown ruts in the slick black tarmac, and for just a second seemed beset by sights and sounds of a strange yestercity.
I’m not sure quite where the image had come from, maybe just some old photograph of a Dublin I hadn’t been born to see, but the moment was suitably profound that I couldn’t help but think:
What would happen if I were to get on a tram in 2011 and, inexplicably, alight ten, twenty or thirty years prior? Where would I go? What would I do? Is there even anyone you could call?
I’m not sure why, but that feeling has stuck with me. I suppose it hasn’t really diminished in any meaningful way; the more I think about it, the more profoundly scary it seems. “It could be happening to someone right now,” I’d think, “how would we ever be able to tell?”
Of course, I understand how preposterous it is. It’s not something to spend real time worrying about. Surely modern man could survive quite well in the fifties. We’ve come a long way. At this point, I realise that a lot of what the modern world has taught me, in terms of survival, is the best means by which to manipulate search engines into teaching me better ways to do things…
Perhaps I should look into sports results of days gone by, just so that I can try to ensure I can bet on something? I need to find myself an almanac, just so that I can keep it on my person at all times… in case of accidental time travel emergency. Not at all ridiculous. I’d be a reverse Biff.
The only real problem is that every step you take to prepare yourself for being shunted unceremoniously into the past only increases the likelihood that you’ll be shot fifty years into the future.
A future where none of the things you know are relevant anymore, and nobody understands why you’re so backward… I guess gravity-inversion would be a mercy.
