The only thing I could think about writing that could just barely provide a comparison to what it had felt like during my hour at the stern was to recall what I had said some four years earlier as we looked toward the two towers from the South Street Seaport. “When I let my imagination run with it, I see [those] tall buildings gone one day, and then I imagine someone having tried to… replace them. And [another generation who never knew the towers as they had stood] would think it right [the new skyline]. But to anyone from our own time, it would be apparent immediately that the skyline was all wrong.
“And what am I trying to do now?” I asked Mary. “Trying to describe an indescribable emotion? [But] sometimes you can… destroy mystery and beauty by trying to put it into words when the proper words don’t exist yet; so you make do with the ones that already exist, and they turn out to be inadequate beyond measure.”
I realized that it was now nearly 3 a.m., that I had not slept for three days, and that I was probably not making very much sense.
Vinogradov came into the bio lab and was surprised to find me still awake. Then he admitted that as exhausting as days like this could be, not many people were likely to sleep after exploring the wildlife of the deep scattering layer, the Titanic’s bow, and the Titanic’s stern—all in one day. Today had been one of the greatest days of my life, certainly the single greatest day of my career. My brain was in a wonderful state of sensory overload, with enough having been seen and learned to keep me busy for a decade.
Still my thoughts returned, without any good reason of which I was consciously aware, to Mary’s friend Captain Brown. Neither Vinogradov nor I would have guessed that a particularly bad cold (or a summer flu) had altered Mary’s schedule and was about to keep her out of harm’s way or that an unexpected career change was about to send my cousin Donna in the very same direction as Captain Brown. It was 3 a.m. Both Paddy Brown and Donna had only a few hours left to live.
Paddy was captain of Ladder 3 at the New York City fire department, or FDNY. Donna worked for Marsh and McLennan, near the top of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Though safe, Mary would be close enough to see how death came to Paddy and Donna. Devastatingly close.
It was 3 a.m. Titanic time, September 11, 2001. As a child I had dreamed of descending where my idol William Beebe (codesigner of the world’s first deep-diving bathysphere) had gone: into the realm of the ever black and strange fish. In reality, I had just gone beyond Beebe and exceeded my greatest childhood dreams. Who would have believed that the greatest of days and the worst of days could be the same day?
12
How Much Does Darkness Weigh?
At the expedition’s start, a journalist friend named Rip MacKenzie had put forth a question that, once relayed through Arthur C. Clarke’s laptop, was e-mailed around the world to a hundred scientists and theologians, quickly generating more than a thousand pages. The question was deceptively simple and direct: “How much does darkness weigh?”
Some respondents wrote about the three tons of water that pressed in against every square inch of the Mir’s hull, down in the sunless abyss into which the Titanic had fallen. Others wrote about the mass of a single photon against the immensity of space and time. Still others spoke about the emerging case for the existence of dark matter—incapable of interacting with the force of electromagnetism, and therefore unable to reflect or absorb light or even to form atoms as we know them, yet somehow making itself known through gravitation and dark energy. As much as 95 percent of the mass in the universe appears to be made of something unseen and unknown—and the rest, only 5 percent, consists of the atoms and energy of stars and planets.
“Darkness is only the product of our own senses, and challenges us simply because it is a mirror of our own limitations,” wrote microbiologist Roy Cullimore, more philosophically than most. “If we could see into shadows and feel the contents, then it would have a relative value and would not be viewed as a shadow.”
From Sri Lanka, Father Mervyn Fernando, a student of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s works, provided an altogether different and perhaps even prophetic answer. Being a Catholic who often sounded more Buddhist than Christian, Father Fernando saw human intelligence, and perhaps sentience elsewhere in the universe, all originating in whatever universal singularity (or cosmic black hole) preceded the Big Bang. To him, from the dust of the first dying stars and the binding properties of the carbon atom, intelligent life became “only the final product, the apex of this vast process across billions of years.” He viewed sentient life and the development of civilizations—the light at the end of the evolutionary process—as the point at which the universe started to become conscious of itself, of once dark and lifeless carbon trying to understand itself.
Humans are not only conscious, Fernando observed, but also the only creatures who know that we are conscious. He saw the future of human consciousness as a progression toward increasingly higher levels of interconnectivity. To the Sri Lankan theologian, the library at Alexandria and the earliest printing presses were but the first baby steps toward binding our species into a single global membrane of human thought. Electronic communication via telegraph and telephone were a next step—the global web, another. As early as the 1980s (with the aid of a local knight), Fernando’s Subhodi teaching center and orphanage became one of the first places in the country connected to satellite uplinks and an astronomical observatory.
If sentient beings were living nearly ninety light-years away on one of the worlds circling the star HD 70642, and if they possessed a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope, the electronic shrieks of CQD and SOS from the Titanic would have just then been reaching them, as virtually a lone voice from wilderness Earth, crying out from one of 1912’s most powerful wireless telegraphs. “One of our civilization’s very first birth cries to the universe,” the priest observed, “actually came from the Titanic.”
By 2001, our robots were broadcasting close-up views of the Titanic’s interior across a whole interconnected world and into classrooms. Father Fernando saw in this the dawning reality of Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, the emergence of a global superconsciousness that might ultimately shine out against the darkness. “But this was not a development without peril,” he warned.
“Though Teilhard [might] proclaim that the age of nations is past,” Fernando said, “the task before us, if we would not perish, is to shake off our ancient prejudices, [for] there are strong resistances in the form of pulls towards breakup and fragmentation. The growing unity of [humanity] on the globe suffers a thousand violences and antagonisms, hostilities and wars, hot and cold, that prevail so painfully in the world today.”
At 3:30 a.m. Titanic time, on September 11, 2001, I had still not gone to sleep. In my restlessness, I wrote my own answer to MacKenzie’s question, “How much does darkness weigh?”
“It is the emotion for which there are no words,” I said, referring to actually being in the presence of “the old girl,” the Titanic. “It is the color with no name.”
I realized that it might take the rest of my life to explain what I had felt a few hours earlier at the stern and what I was still feeling two and a half miles above, in the lab—a feeling for which there did indeed seem to be no words but that transforms the heart.