There's a funny thing about going to sleep at night near one of the world's busiest airports [O'Hare Field, Chicago]. Slipping under your very personal blankets, you're surrounded by the steady hum of its very public jetliners. A metaphor for the gaping contrast between your inner psyche and your outer world....!
Maybe bridging this gap is what the 1000 travelers are looking for, as they book passage on the Atlantic cruise ship scheduled to depart April 8, 2012 [the 100-year anniversary of the "Titanic's" ill-fated journey]. How does anyone get inside someone else's life? Mind? Soul?
Making love is said to be the yearning of one to be one with the other. Making great music and art and theatre is too. However, we live in the tormented irony of an age with more means -- yet less success -- in accomplishing this. Flooded with autobiographies, bi-ops, intimate blogospheric details, and now these absurd televised insults to the word "reality," we know incredibly less about each other than we should. Especially as our family's and societies are becoming more unstoppably mixed, crowded and blended every year.
Perhaps the problem is our tsunami of hand-held wonders that are supposed to network us, but sometimes isolate us. Do you ever study a commuter train where no one is talking or touching, while they focus with dazzling attention on their private screens? And then do you ever wonder how many loved ones -- parents, spouses, children, siblings, friends -- you know who you don't really know?
When they are gone -- as will they all the longer you live! -- did we travel together without ever truly being together? I find myself struggling post-mortem to piece together the shards of my memories into the full mosaic the departed loved ones actually were. It has become a passion...
....now if only I had taken more time to be this passionate when they were still here.
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