It's our nature as humans to wonder about the unknown, about uncharted waters and skies. We like to go where we've never been.
It seems that today there are fewer physical frontiers left to explore, but I suspect that 300 years ago, the citizens of the time entertained a smug notion that they had maxed out the margins, as did Neanderthal man a bit further back. It's all relative.
We acknowledge our personal limitations, the ones we've placed on ourselves. Many of those, we simply haven't had the time, or means, or strategy to confront. For instance, I have never stood in the sand of a great desert or on an ice-capped Himalayan mountaintop; I have never been submerged in an ocean to feel the dead eyes of great sharks around me, never plunged by bungee cord over Victoria Falls, nor jumped from the relative security of a plane, tumbling through the air with an expectant hand pulsing around a parachute cord.
Some of these things, I may someday experience. Of most of them, though, I shall be content to read about, to visit in the words of those more adventurous than I. Still, I have a healthy curiosity, a secret urge to be where I have never been, or at least to peer through the hole in the fence to see it firsthand, dip my toe into the water, sure that I can still step back if I wish.
Death is our ultimate fascination of the unknown, speculated upon by men since the beginning of our fragile human history. Subject of our imagination, our art, our music, our prayers, we never tire of wondering where we go, or hoping that we truly do go somewhere, after our bodies die. It seems inherent in our natures never to let go.
Ronald Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut, has courted the possibility of "time travel" since childhood, when he suffered the trauma of his father's death. Dan Falk writes that Mallett's imagination-based research as a boy stretched from reading H.G. Wells' science-fiction novel "The Time Machine" to a dedicated, mature study of Albert Einstein's complex theories, among them, that "Since light carries energy and energy is equivalent to mass, beams of light can distort spacetime, just as large masses do."
Never fully abandoning the possibility of seeing his father again, Mallett took his determination to a more scientific, sophisticated level, aiming to construct a time machine of sorts, wherein "empty space would become twisted in a circle of laser beams which, if intense enough, could create a loop in time, causing an object that traveled along the curve to travel into its own past."
Who could resist being transfixed by the daring possibility of winding back into the past, or being thrust into the future, of being released from the dead? Harry Houdini thought he could do it with magic, but when considered in a scientific context, its promise is a thousand times even more intriguing. Maybe Houdini was not so far off base.
I've just finished reading an exquisite rendering of heart-wrenching details from another curious place we humans sometimes go but rarely return from to report the details. Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, articulates his experience of suffering (although he makes no mention of "suffering") a massive stroke at the age of 43, leaving him suspended in "locked-in syndrome."
Paralyzed.
But for the ability to blink one eye, Bauby's identity was sealed inside an inert body, a body that should have died after such a massive stroke, but as the result of "improved resuscitation techniques, (he lived) to have the agony prolonged and refined."
Through an ingenious "alphabet" code devised by Sandrine, his dedicated speech therapist, Bauby dictated perhaps the most stunning 132 pages I have ever read. He did this through the arduous blinking of his one functional eyelid.
Sentimentality and self-pity never entered into his account of that curious last year of his life, spent at the Naval Hospital at Berck-sur-Mer, a prisoner of his own body. Courage and a keen mind seemed to transcend the body that had betrayed him, the body that did however, give him that year of time in which he chose to reflect and share the unlikely truth that if it must be, a life can be lived without a body; a life can be sustained by the recollection of one's experience. The laughter of one's children; the complexities of one's profession; the taste of foods that were prepared to perfection; the long, hot bath.
To go where one has never been: be careful what you wish for. I recall with perfect clarity the hours I spent 30 years ago sitting beside my mother's bed, holding her lifeless hand following a cerebral aneurysm. She lay in a coma for nearly five months, and when my weeping had finally exhausted me, I used to wonder what, if anything, she was thinking. I wondered if she heard me when I spoke to her. I wished I could share the space in her mind for a while.
Then she "awoke" one day, raising her left arm slightly and waving "good-bye" to us with her little finger, and we hung onto the gesture as the miracle of our lives. Something was unlocked inside her, and she lived another 16 years in a wheelchair, regaining her somewhat caustic sense of humor, enjoying her grandchildren, watching the birds, admiring the flowers, licking an ice cream cone. But she was a different mother, a different wife, a different person. And she never recalled her life in the coma, or if she did, she would not speak of it.
To go where one has never been: yes, be careful what you wish for ...
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Susan S. Emerson is a regular Times columnist.
