I am a big commander in some streampunk dystopian future. I’m being driven in a limo to talk with someone about something important.
The scene cuts to an intellectual: he’s smart and ambitious — one of those slender Scandinavian academics — thin and vital, at home with intellectual work. He works in his office or study; he talks to himself about some things. He gets up and begins a mathematical equation.
I walk in, almost imperially. I talk to him as he finishes his equation; it looks like a physics equation. Part of me wonders, though, how he knows physics; he’s so learned but does he have such scope to be proficient in all areas? I thought he was more a professor of humanities?
In fact, as he is writing the last part of the short equation (there are chalkboards full of equations), he mutters with vehemence about people not understanding his time — by “his time”, he is referring to the 60s!? — but I thought the 60s was all warm and fuzzy.
With his assertion lingering in the air, a miner walks in. This vital, amber-brown-bearded man lifts off his brass steampunk glasses and the fact that he’s covered in soot is now unmistakable, his coal grey face revealing striking eyes and healthy, white-pink circles of skin where the goggles had been.
He’s in his young thirties and layers of experience constitutes his sturdy body. He can’t say anything, though… it’s not his place due the class struggle and the reality of the mines. I can see in his quick, wise, intelligent face that he’s been responsible with and a leader of these efforts; his face shows there is much to be learned from him, despite the passion and ambition of our privileged intellectual.