About the law of nature thing I mean. I was trying to describe the exact feeling I had, being me, standing there with a passport in each hand.
It wasn’t nostalgia. It was the uncomfortably clear sensation of time passing, irrevocably. Something I normally try to distract myself from perceiving. You know how that goes? You always feel like the same person, unchanged, inside. It’s like one big day, over and over.
The irrevocable passage of time – and I’m not talking about the transience of all things, not precisely – has always crushed me. I can clearly remember the moment I figured it out. I was somewhere, with someone, doing something, back when I was a boy I think.
It was late December 1964, I think. That would make me five. I was in my parent’s room bugging my mother as she made the bed. She said next year would be 1965 and I asked when it would be 1964 again and she said never, that’s it for 1964.
She might have even been relieved. I, on the other hand, threw myself onto the bed she was making and wept for 1964, which I would never see again. She said something soothing, like, Get off the bed, would you, I’m working here.
Linear time has horrified me ever since then. Why can’t it be circular? Even cooler would be spiral time, where if you are good, on the next spiral you automatically have a driver’s license, for example, and don’t have to take the test again. Or you don’t talk to that person at that bar who ended up getting you evicted. Whatever.
Oh, that would be brilliant, instead of a sketch of life, maybe get a full painting.
i used to get pretty sad on new year’s eve. now i feel that it is just something that passes regardless of what i feel, so i don’t feel so sad!
“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” – Mr. Vonnegut
(if i make any progress with understanding string theory, i’ll let you know; it sounds like your kind of amber)
What chills me is the very visible drift, on summer evenings, of shadows across the blank wall of a nearby building. Everything seems still, and yet we are all spinning at over a thousand miles per hour. Time becomes concrete – fluid concrete.