Thursday, February 03, 2005

All the world's a stage

I spent this afternoon helping the other students line up the collimators for next week's experiments. The process involves one person peering through a telescope and another person fiddling with the collimators themselves, trying to get them lined up with the beam axis. And the telescope is out of sight of the target area (behind a large magnet) so you have to communicate by shouting over the background noise of pumps and fans and whatnot. It sounded something like this:
"LEFT A BIT"
"WHAT?"
"LEFT!"
"THIS WAY?"
"NO, THE OTHER WAY"
"WHAT?"
"NO!"
"OKAY, HOW'S THIS?"
"A BIT MORE...A BIT MORE...JUST A BIT MORE....KEEP GOING.....STOP! TOO FAR!"

After half an hour of this, I realized, my life is a play. And not just any play. My life is a Samuel Beckett play.

I find this uplifting, in some perverse way.

1 comment:

Ray said...

That dialog sounds eerily familiar.