Night had fallen. I must have been six, and even back then it was hard for me to get to sleep. At our place we slept with the television on; the glow it gave off was the extension of another world. What I saw that night left me with the feeling of having glimpsed a hidden, illicit reality: the cabin of a spaceship in which a man grew old in a matter of seconds, a looming monolith, a star fetus floating in the uterus of space. The next morning, in the deceptive safety of daylight, I had no words to describe that nocturnal transgression. I carried those images within me like a secret, a burning question, a reminder that the flimsy fabric of normality can be torn apart at any moment. It was only years later, as an adolescent, that I discovered the name of that event. Since then I have watched 2001: A Space Odyssey over and over again… read more >
