In his classic psychological drama of time travel “Slaughter House Five,” Kurt Vonnegut describes his protagonist Billy Pilgrim as being “unstuck in time.” This would suggest that we are tethered to what physicists refer to as our “world line,” the path in space and time that we travel. For us time is an arrow and we move ever forward. For Billy Pilgrim, well, not so much. “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

You may have heard yesterday that a US military surveillance blimp became untethered in Maryland and drifted a couple of hundred miles across rural Pennsylvania. Yes unstuck, unthethered, but certainly not in time. Well a photograph taken yesterday by Jimmy May of Bloomberg Press Enterprise via the AP tells, or at least suggests, a different pilgrimage for the blimp.  He captured it hanging over an Amish horse drawn carriage in Millville, PA. The Amish strive for a peaceful timelessness and here it was certainly broken by an apparent anachronism.

“It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”

Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughter House Five,” 1969