It was this phrase from a book published in 2010, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson. I read:

“A vast cloud limned about its edges with moonlight seemed not to move even glacially across the sky.”

What is that cloud doing? The sentence seems to suggest that it is so still as to even lag behind the bare minimum of speed. That limit is the speed of a glacier, which the cloud resembles not in image, but in rhythm.

But it’s been long since the last time a glacier moved glacially. All one can see is bodies of ice travelling swiftly across the oceans, all one can hear is a rumble as they disperse into pieces, momentarily freezing the water, then letting it warm up again in their absence.

Here it is, my mind understanding a phrase that my experience refuses.

Nature metaphors have been long used to dilute human time to the scale of the infinite. All the blooming flowers of sex and the moonlights of the soul functioned as a thread tightly fastened to eternity, a fragile tightrope connecting human frenziness to the constituting rhythm of the cosmos. It worked. It made sense.

This is why it is so literary powerful to invoke the infinitesimal space between stillness and glacial-ness. Placed so closely together, almost touching, these temporalities seem to collapse into one another. The glacier, then, becomes the visible representation of absolute stillness, of timelessness.

But now, this sentence is throwing me into dissonance.

Stillness and glacial-ness are drifting apart, the space between their movements expanded to nest the marathon runner, the lion, and the car. Nature is less and less providing metaphors for eternity, yet literature still clutches at the same worn-down ropes, trying to swing over a gap that has become an abyss.

The analogy has been stretching itself to the limits. Which is to suggest that maybe it is time to let it break and tune our metaphors to another reality. Get in sync with the new rhythm.

How else to listen and speak with those natural entities, if not by abandoning what has long stopped describing them? How else to do justice to them, if not by conversing with their present?

What would it mean to write that something is moving glacially, as in quickly disappearing?

Author Bio:

Orestis Kollyris is a researcher and writer currently based in the Netherlands. He was trained in scenography and costume design in Greece and earned an MA in Arts and Society from Utrecht University in 2024.

Banner Image Credits: The author