Midterm Week; Context
<<2003-03-13 - 11:47 a.m.>>

One squirrel chasing another up a lamppost, panting dog pacing a middleaged man on a bicycle, and I am standing in the middle of campus with the panic of not having turned in my Gender and History paper within my extended deadline momentarily at bay, chatting with a professor about sleep-deprivation and Bush's holy war. It is we and the willing, he apparently said on the radio this morning. Us and Bulgaria. Very comforting.

And now I am panicky about the paper again, and everything else I have to do today and tomorrow (physics problem set, physics quiz, Humanities midterm). But context. We and the willing marching off to war. My father on the Broadway picket lines.

We are such small pieces of the world. My little sister on Weight Watchers, waiting to see if she gets into the Mountain School for next semester, gets out of the house for a few precious months. John on academic probation because all he wants to do is dance. The story he told me: the two boys grappling cinematically in the illuminated street over a passive girl.

I can't help thinking that if we are all added up, all of us, we can find our total. Look at these lives we lead, small and shining; look at us loving each other and hurting each other and brushing our teeth. Look at the abundance of other people, people who never know us but go about their lives anyway, with opinions and jobs and children whom they love and leave and fuck up in their own idiosyncratic ways, with their own joy and pain.

I am at a conference table. Sitting with other people. What are they thinking? That girl there is married. She went to Cuba on exchange and married a Cuban man. I heard her talking about it when I was on line behind her a few weeks ago.

And a couple of months ago, a girl, a Reedie, died. In a car crash. In New Zealand. The article in the campus newspaper said that she had started a group that went around repainting signs, changing the "W"s on "One Way" signs into "D"s. One Day.

But no more days. The girl is dead. The days go on.

Maybe more, then, more than us. Maybe we add up to more than the sum of our lives. What sums? Maybe we are adding the infinte. Where are the limits of us? Lucretius said that the universe is infinite because if it were bounded and a man were sent to the edge and threw a spear, where would it go? For each individual, the universe is limitless, and we in our increasing multitudes and histories, trailing our glowing trail behind us as we progress forward into time, we are infinite too.

Space breeds and multiplies—infinity itself expands.

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