Chapter VIII — Raconteur Road
Dissipation — The price of existing far from equilibrium.
Everything you love is dissipating. The light, the moment, the fjord, the last inch of daylight before the lamp inside has to do the work. Dissipation is the entropy price of being here at all. The photograph does not stop it. The photograph is itself a small dissipation in service of a larger memory.
Camp, the fire holds the line
Out here the dark is not a backdrop, it is a pressure, and the cold comes with it. So you burn something — wood you carried, diesel, whatever you have — and for a few hours the fire pushes both of them back to the edge of the light. The universe wants the heat. You are just borrowing it on the way out.
A fire is a small argument with the second law. You always lose. You light it anyway.
Meteor shower, Atacama
Every streak is a grain of grit, most no bigger than a sand corn, dying in a line of light because it hit the air too fast to survive it. We came out to wish on them. Each wish is a speck of the early solar system cremating itself sixty miles up, for our entertainment.
A shooting star is a rock you are watching pay its entry fee.