Monday, January 24, 2005

After the sun goes nova, vaporizes the earth and sheds its envelopes of matter into the universe, it will dwindle into a little dwarf star and eventually die a quiet death. My recycled bones will, in billions of years, disintegrate along with the rest of the planet and the molecules will reduce to atoms and perhaps some sub-atomic bits. Our carbon will float among the rest of the stellar discharge, everything from my fingers to the entire body of literature. Will the next archeology be an alien race reconstructing our art microscopic fragment by microscopic fragment? Will they learn our languages and piece together adolescent diaries and masterful sonnets? Will they eventually be defunded when their civilization goes to war? Or will we make up their world until the universe freezes in total entropy?

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