The Gap of Time

by Jeanette Winterson

A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we’d die of heartbreak.

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone?

Forgiveness is a word like tiger—there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is.

We had made him. With no skills and no training, no college diploma and no science dollars, we had made a human being. What is this crazy, reckless world where we can make human beings?

And though the earth is lost, she will be found. “Whatever is lost will be found.”

“One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn’t happen to everyone.”

The world was getting darker, not brighter. The poor were poorer, the rich were richer. People were killing each other in the name of God. What kind of a God wanted his followers to act like they were gun-slung avatars jihading it through “World of Warcraft”?

We need to be free from corporate control that runs the world for the few and ruins it for the rest of us.”

Sometimes it doesn’t matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn’t matter that it’s night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It’s not that time stops or that it hasn’t started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

‘Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.’ ”

everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.

And do we reach enlightenment by setting out or by sitting still? And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

And the story fell out stone by stone, shining and held, the way time is held in a diamond, the way the light is held in each stone. And stones speak, and what was silent opens its mouth to tell a story and the story is set in stone to break the stone. What happened happened. But. The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.

And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman’s fortune or one man’s loss. And we can’t know the lives of others. And we can’t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside of the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

As Ezra Pound said, “Make it new.”

That things are not what they seem is the terror and the glory of The Winter’s Tale.

Maybe then I will remember that, although history repeats itself and we always fall, and I am a carrier of history whose brief excursion into time leaves no mark, I have known something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote. Like a pocket of air in an upturned boat.