At my age I’m sometimes visited at home by a nurse. On her last visit the nurse had to work around Carl the cat, so I began showing her this catpost with its anno 1955 video of a space alien teaching math to an earthling holding a slide rule.
https://jonathanmorse.blog/2026/09/03/shall-we-say-a-colleague/
But I interrupted the contemplation long enough to ask, “Do you know what that is?”
Not only did the nurse not know; she didn’t even know the term slide rule.
Two-beat pause.
But as the object of visits from a nurse, I am now officially eligible for inspiration from Tennyson’s Ulysses. About to embark for the last time, that aged hero looks back and gives his last command:
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Accordingly, I withdraw some of the consolation that literary culture has allotted to us who read. But what if the tale of my own journey were so unheroic that it couldn’t reach its happy ending on schedule, or any ending on any schedule? What if my life were only to continue unscrolling down its page, not in verse with a regularizing syllable count but in prose?
What if I am a Struldbrug? An innumerate Struldbrug without full stops, trying to say slide rule?
Two-beat pause.
But look back yourself. What you see at about minute 6:45 of this video from anno 1940 will be slide rules — slide rules in motion, as if they were still being moved by men’s hands.
Moved through 1940, as if the men who held them in their hands in 1940 were still alive, still holding.
https //archive.org/ /DialComesToT
Of course they’re only an optical illusion. Nevertheless, the illusion somehow looks alive, despite the time. Within the illusion, does it look as if these men counting down have learned from their stopwatch how to stop time but start again?
Two-beat pause. Then words capable of reproducing themselves on their soundtrack and becoming thereby unchangeable:
“Oh Gramps, that’s yummy!”
