Soft light over valleys resting in shadow
cradled by mountains grasping at the sky
lords of the winding rivers gone far away
to quench the horizon’s thirst for more
The pull of that beckoning divide
that urge to descend beyond what eyes can see
already halfway there before the mind knows it’s moving
and by then it’s too late to stop, too late to resist
gathering speed down rocky slopes
the world dissolving into color and shadow
melting away and seeping under the skin
the weight of every possibility dragged down
with a body now remembering what it is to dissolve
and flow with wide currents toward a horizon it can never reach
—
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Finally getting around to reading 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even having seen the movie already, it has me captivated. The fact that it was published in 1968 blows me away—just like the movie, it captures a sense of the future that even to this day seems far removed from us.
—
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The Light is On 
2 responses to “The Descent”
I was at a conference on computational intelligence in about 2000, and the after dinner speaker talked about 2001 and HAL. And at that point we had computers that could do almost everything HAL could, although not lip-reading. In some ways we’re pretty close to what Clarke guessed, but in others, like space travel, way way off. No one has been on the moon in my lifetime – reading a lot of sci-fi as a kid, I was devastated when I discovered that. I still feel kind of ripped off.
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It really is amazing to think of everything he got right. Just wish he we were closer to where he saw space travel going by now. Hopefully we see a resurgence of spacefaring in the coming years!
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