"Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn't entirely there.
You haven't heard of the Bay of Mante, have you? he said.
'No, sir,' said Mort.
Famous shipwreck there.
'Was there?'
There will be, said Death, if I can find the damn place."
- Mort, Terry Pratchett
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
-A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5. 1
Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown
of life.
-Revelation, 2. 10
It was a bloody hectic time. Feverishly writing out the final few annoying lines of code for my project, about 10 cups of tea a day, writing lab report for the Comm. labs, reading for tests, trying to be steady during lab exams, thinking about a lot of beginnings and endings, trying to be coherent, and not succeeding very well, writing for interns applications, the cut-and-run of the finals, muted goodbyes, hurried journeys and the final despondency when it was all finally, immutably over.
They say that sometimes when the battle is over, the interminable peace during the aftermath is worse than the struggle.
Sitting in the frigid NCRA computer lab hunting quasars, it came to me that I was suffering from an advanced state of shell-shock, that the gloom was there to stay unless I exorcised it, and that listening to Viva la Vida twenty times in a row was not going to ease the pain. I should have started accepting that I was still capable of enjoyment after all the upheaval, as so many people were trying to tell me.
So here's to devastation and to destruction, to Lucifer and Gabriel, to pride and prejudice, and to resurgam and revelations. And not necessarily in that order either. 'Let there be light' is a sweeping and highly general statement, but there is no denying that illumination of the order of a few candela would definitely not be remiss.
