In a confused stream of thought, moving like a pendulum between reality and fiction, notes fluttered on the walls of the cabinet of curiosities. The saucer, which looked more like a work of art than a piece of furniture, grumbled:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” 1
while it watched a shrinking glacier floating in his cup of tea. Global warming, it seemed, had reached a point where the very hold of time was being called into question. Was it 2022 or another year? The glaciers suffered, danced, lost and gained, all at the same time, to the beat of inertia, a reality that felt different than it looked, in a universe where greenhouse gas emissions became mournful melodies that soared worldwide.
In another corner of the room, a voice from Mahé, an island that was now probably a metaphor for lost hopes, whispered something incomprehensible to itself. As the greenhouse gases rose inexorably, the words danced like shadows, mocking reality and creating an image of the world that seemed to devour itself in its distortion.
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Mark Twain ↩︎