You can see it from miles away, sunlight gleaming off its silver exterior. It resembles a rocket from a black-and-white movie, sleek and upright and poised to launch effortlessly into regions unknown. It is not the tallest structure in the world, but it is close.
Some call it one of the seven modern wonders. When you stand in its shadow, craning your neck to follow its metallic curve, you feel that man can touch the stars, that mankind’s destiny is to transform planets and to transverse nebulae and to fill the universe with his glory.
But despite its appearance, the structure is not a rocket. Its lower levels display exhibits of man’s achievements, of the planting of flags at the South Pole and upon the moon, of the circumnavigation of Magellan, of the exploration of the depths and the proliferation of the Internet.
What next? the exhibits ask. Where does mankind go next? To other worlds? To other galaxies?
Perhaps, someday.
But a greater triumph has been realized. Imagine, like Keats did upon seeing an old pot, that you could live in a single moment forever. Maybe it’s the embrace of a loved one, or the triumph of a boxer, or the revelation of a philosopher. Maybe it’s simply the effusive headiness of spring fever or the insatiable angst of wanderlust. Strip the danger from space travel and keep the dream of adventure; excise old age and time from new-found love; eliminate the ever after from happily.
The Rocket still sends people to space. It still encompasses the ambition of mankind. It is the final frontier of humanity’s immortality.
Above the exhibit, the Rocket holds its secret.
There are rooms, constructed by great minds, where lovers might stand, or an athlete after winning the gold, or a mother upon seeing her children graduate. In a flash of power and science and self-awareness, they are shot across the universe in a beam of light.
There is no destination except the far edge of the ever-expanding universe. In pure light they speed through the cold void, timeless, just as Einstein predicted.
Their relatives and friends will grow old and die. The Earth will age and suffer. But they live on in one endless moment–as happy as the moment the technicians flipped the switch to convert them from matter to energy.
It is heaven, perfected by man himself–eternity in a moment, a moment for eternity.
No one knows what it is like to live frozen in a moment, whether doubt and fear and corruption exist forever beneath whatever emotion sent them into the sky, whether a moment stretched to infinity is like death after all.
The Rocket gleams in the sun, and at night flood lights illuminate its sheen. If you watch, you can see the beams shooting forth, one after the other, from its pinnacle into the unknown, where they are lost in the emptiness.