every life is a closed universe – Darragh Savage

October 25, 2020

The heart of every living creature beats approximately the same number of times before it stops, so life is therefore a matter of velocity rather than time. This was something an old friend told me, a thin boy from Barcelona who liked speed and whose heart as a result always beat very fast.

You should stop that then, I’d say, cutting myself a line—you’re wasting your allotment.

He didn’t, in any case, live long enough for it to matter. He was struck by a train he had thought his small red car quick enough to beat across a railway crossing. Though of course this was, at its essence, also a matter of speed, of acceleration, and hence of velocity—proving in the end, perhaps in a different way than he imagined, his point. Or perhaps he’d misjudged nothing, and the car was moving exactly as fast as he had wanted it to be.