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Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We’re too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about.
Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we’re up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there’s a little bit of splashing on the surface, but that doesn’t even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.
Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.
over time (that one true damage-causing substance),
“More like a window,” I say, and I see that she gets it. “By using your time machine this way, you are creating a small porthole into another universe, a neighboring universe. One almost exactly like ours, except that in this alternate world you were there when she died.
you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a
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This is what time is.
P-I
Present-Indefinite
The lurching forward, the sensation of falling off a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the
almost missed this buzzing, gauzy field of vision, the periscoped consciousness, the friction and traction of being in my own life, of using it up, had almost forgotten the danger and pleasure of living in the present, the chaotic, slapdash, yet overproduced stage-scene of each moment, assembling itself then disbanding, each moment taking itself apart, just like that, the sets struck, each instant in time falling apart just as it is coming together.
The conditions of a place like 31, with its incomplete conceptual framework, regions of exposed wireframe structure, lack of complexity in terms of story line geometries, and dearth of heroes, provides an ideal environment for corporate operators to test out new ideas, allowing them to proliferate without worry of what will happen to the generally expendable, low-self-esteem human population within the space.
Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.
bodhisattva,
This idea is consistent with the current understanding of the neuronal mechanism of human memory, i.e., every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the experience as well.
If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.
“The key question of time travel,” my father says, “is this: How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event?
How can we tell present from past?
time travel is not a technology built outside, with titanium and beryllium and argon and xenon and seaborgium, but rather it is a mental ability that can be cultivated.
Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event. Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent.
Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you’re not looking, it’s there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it’s the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it’s not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.
It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn’t there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it’s all inertia from here, it’s all coasting, it’s all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it’s in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be,
fundamentally, my father is, was, has always been a sad man. Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity. The sadness was generational, accumulated
like heavy elements in us, like we were large sea life, enormous ocean fish, swimming silent, collecting the sadness and moving through the deep with it, never stopping, always increasing the quantity in our bodies, always moving forward, never fully sleeping, eaters of sadness. Bite by bite, meal by meal, becoming made of sadness. Passed down like an inheritance, a negative inheritance, a long line of poor, clever men, growing, over time, slightly less poor, and slightly more clever, but never wise.
