My wife and I were coming to the surface after a night scuba dive. I was looking up at the surface of the water as we hung at a depth of 5 metres. The light from my torch was reflecting back off the black undersurface of the water in diverse, coloured beams. We seemed to be suspended under the ceiling of a huge, dark room that extended every way into blackness.
After the requisite stop we ascended slowly, turning in a spiral as we followed our bubbles upwards. The shock occurred as I broke through the black ceiling of the surface. I inflated the diving jacket, removed my mask, and lay back on the surface of the water. Looking up, the Milky Way stretched out over the equatorial sky like a bridge that you almost reach out and touch. I have never seen anything quite like it. We lay there for some time waiting for the (rather distant) boat to pick us up. For some reason, hung out against the stars, I suddenly thought of a short story whose title I have long forgotten.
The story was about a young woman who, for some undefined reason, was the last person left alive in the world. She wandered the planet, listening to cassette tapes in abandoned cars, walking through the detritus of people's interrupted lives, looking at famous pictures in deserted galleries. After a while she began to realise that she was forgetting things about the civilisation she had inhabited. She was mixing up Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, the Etruscans and the Assyrians, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The disturbing thing about this was that her internal monologue, the thing that made her conscious, was the only thing that gave the ruins of this deserted world any meaning. And that meaning was degrading in her unreliable memory. The story was pregnant with the implicit question of where the meaning would reside, if anywhere, when she was gone. The paintings would become oil stains, works of literature just so many marks on white cellulose.
We eventually climbed back into the little dive boat and made our way silently to our island. I was still musing, slightly uneasily, on my vertiginous perspective of the spiral arm of the galaxy when I entered the brightly lit bedroom of our beach bungalow. My daughter looked at me quizzically from the bed. “Daddy,” she said. “Why didn't Gandalf step back on the bridge?” Why indeed?