Machinery

An excerpt from The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this -- how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery.  It's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes.  Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone.

A man lives so many different lengths of time.
A man is so many different lengths of time.
Change. Collapse. Reinvention.