Page 51 - The Irony Board

Into the Body

Finishing
In dead heat,
Slow burners
The fast beat.

Here is another view of the human race against time, based
loosely on the fabled Achilles and the tortoise marathon. Zeno used
that contest in a temporal paradox; so does Gluckman, but toward a
different end: mortality. “Dead heat” is the hinge, making sense in
terms of both athletics and thermodynamics. In the first case, the
phrase indicates that racers of high and low metabolism all reach the
finish line together. Nevertheless, the slow burners have triumphed
by using less energy to achieve the same performance.
The other meaning is less trivial. “Heat death” is the total
exhaustion of energy, a literal and absolute finishing of life: entropy
is the only real winner here, requiring fast and slow burners alike to
run out of fuel. But again the low flame has the advantage, because
it lasts longer. The explicit paradox of speed losing to sloth thus
functions as a parable of objective haste making subjective waste.

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