House of Cards

     Always destruction is faster than building. A big family dinner can take a full day to cook but eating rarely takes more than an hour. Clean up is faster than adding ingredients and cooking as well, and the time to make a fancy dinner is easily two-thirds of the total time. The Twin Towers of New York City imploded in an hour and a half but took five years to construct.
     The universe's touted law of entropy never sleeps. Disassembly is quicker than manufacturing. One of the starkest revelers of this fact is fire.

     House fires, ships burning at sea, fires that consume entire cities from Rome in 64 AD to London  in 1666 to Chicago in 1873. The accumulated work of thousands of hands is destroyed in hours. The Sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths in 410 robbed the city of nearly 800 years of art and wealth.
     While man is a master craftsman capable of making beauty inexpressible in words, he is also the master of ruins. Life is a tentative thing with many ingredients needed to usher in a new generation that can be undone with few decisive actions. Genocide removes a unique perspective of life from the world just as war obliterates the creations of an entire civilization. Is man not to fight the entropy around him by assisting, fabricating, and envisioning what the works of his hands could be? Let us not allow the continual story of man's answer to entropy be bureaucracy and mass production but the beauty of our lives, stories, and the love we share with our fellow man.


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Agatha Tyche