In late 2005 I was privileged to gaze upon one of the marvels of the modern world. Buried around 30 metres under the Swiss–French border, near Geneva, is a roughly circular tunnel, about 27 kilometres long. The tunnel is lined in grey concrete, with a painted floor, and is about three metres across.
What are we going to do with the stupid?
We don’t laugh at people’s DNA any more. Or refuse to give people with certain genes, but not others, jobs. Nor do we enslave them or prevent them from voting. And if we do, it is generally accepted that we are doing a Very Bad Thing indeed. And rightly so. This is new, of course. Just two generations ago it was perfectly acceptable to mock and discriminate against those of different skin colour and ethnicity, the very small and the very tall, the brawny and the weak. In my country, people, even quite nice people, talked openly about ‘Jewboys’ and ‘darkies’, ‘shortarses’ and much worse. Those condemned (perhaps) by their DNA to be homosexual were not only discriminated against by the hoi polloi, but by the law.
Is Fido a zombie?
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to find myself 11,000 feet up on the side of a volcano in Rwanda. This central African country is really one of the most charming, eccentric and surreal places on Earth. I don’t think I have ever been anywhere, certainly not in Africa, that felt more serene, cheerful and at ease with itself. And yet, just a little more than a decade before my visit, this country was consumed by a carnal spasm of bloodlust rarely equalled anywhere in history.
Can I live forever please?
Ageing is as inevitable as the sunrise and taxes, right? Well, yes, if you are unlucky enough to be born as a human. We get made, we live our lives, we wear out, we croak. It’s sad and depressing and there is not much we can do about it, so we might as well get used to it. ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work’, Woody Allen once said. ‘I want to achieve it through not dying’.
Why is time so weird??
Time makes our lives. It is the key to how we perceive every-thing, from the ticking of our own minds to the events which mark our passage from birth to death. We can perhaps imagine a universe without colour, or without heat or light, but we cannot imagine a world without time.
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