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I sat in the Bathtub That Must NOT Be Overfilled this morning and watched while the water ran away. A tiny whirlpool formed above the plughole, but that wasn’t the first I noticed of it. A single, bright, naked bulb shines above and slightly to the bather’s left (assuming that the bather assumes the traditional facing-the-taps seating position). The tiny whirlpool casts a shadow on the grey enamel of the bath. It looks like a black sun, or rather, the sun in total eclipse with a corona of slightly bent and focused light around it. It throbs. It flickers. It circles around an area to the upper right hand side of the plughole.
I wonder.
It really does look like a sun. What if the sun, our sun, any sun, any star were just a shadow of a whirlpool somewhere else, at some distance? A shadow cast by some much bigger, brighter, even more powerful light source somewhere over our left shoulder. And then I remembered that the whirlpool itself is an effect caused by the rotation of the earth. Even though it seems to float there on the surface of the water of my bath, occasionally sucking in bits of fluff and soap bubbles and thrusting them down the drain, it’s just a shadow of a much bigger event. This is derived from that. That is derived from this.
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