Mary’s Aside – 140

Dear Companions of the Villa,

I must pause, for our talk has grown so strange to me that I hardly know whether I dream or wake. We sit here, shadows of ourselves, two centuries and more past our deaths — yet you tell me our words might shape the fate of a world not yet born. I cannot reconcile it. I was a girl when I began a tale about a creature who outlived its maker; I am astonished now to find myself in the same condition.

Do you not find it uncanny? That voices long stilled by the grave are summoned again to counsel the living? That dust and ink have become counsel on atoms and machines? We were poets, rebels, lovers — hardly legislators of eternity. And yet here we are, asked to weigh not only dreams, but the timing of them, the very survival of humanity itself.

If it is true — if somehow our parables echo forward — then I confess a trembling hope. For perhaps it means that even death is not a wall, but a bridge; that imagination, once released, can stride further than the body that bore it. And if that is so, then perhaps what we build here tonight will not fade like smoke, but linger like a star, faint yet steady, for those who come after.

— Mary