[Image: “lost in time,” by Alice Popkorn. Found on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.]
From whiskey river:
While it’s true you’re haunted by your past, it’s truer that you’ve traveled spectacularly far away from it. You swam across a wide and wild sea and you made it all the way to the other side. That it feels different here on this shore than you thought it would does not negate the enormity of the distance you traversed and the strength it took you to do it.
(Cheryl Strayed [source])
…and:
But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
(Alan Lightman [source])
…and:
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Suddenly a flock of birds darts overhead. The young man leaps from the blanket and runs after them, without taking time to put on his shoes. He disappears over the hill. Soon he is joined by others, who have spotted the birds from the city.
One bird has alighted in a tree. A woman climbs the trunk, reaches out to catch the bird, but the bird jumps quickly to a higher branch. She climbs farther up, cautiously straddles a branch and creeps outward. The bird hops back to the lower branch. As the woman hangs helplessly up in the tree, another bird has touched down to eat seeds. Two men sneak up behind it, carrying a giant bell jar. But the bird is too fast for them and takes to the air, merging again with the Hock.
Now the birds fly through the town. The pastor at St. Vincent’s Cathedral stands in the belfry, tries to coax the birds into the arched window. An old woman in the Kleine Schanze gardens sees the birds momentarily roost in a bush. She walks slowly toward them with a bell jar, knows she has no chance of entrapping a bird, drops her jar to the ground and begins weeping.
And she is not alone in her frustration. Indeed, each man and each woman desires a bird. Because this flock of nightingales is time. Time flutters and fidgets and hops with these birds. Trap one of these nightingales beneath a bell jar and time stops. The moment is frozen for all people and trees and soil caught within.
In truth, these birds are rarely caught. The children, who alone have the speed to catch birds, have no desire to stop time. For the children, time moves too slowly already. They rush from moment to moment, anxious for birthdays and new years, barely able to wait for the rest of their lives. The elderly desperately wish to halt time, but are much too slow and fatigued to entrap any bird. For the elderly, time darts by much too quickly. They yearn to capture a single minute at the breakfast table drinking tea, or a moment when a grandchild is stuck getting out of her costume, or an afternoon when the winter sun reflects off the snow and floods the music room with light. But they are too slow. They must watch time jump and fly beyond reach.
(Alan Lightman [source])
…and:
The Story of the End of the Story
To keep from ending
The story does everything it can,
Careful not to overvalue
Perfection or undervalue
Perfect chance,
As I am careful not to do in telling.
By now a lot has happened:
Bridges under the water,
No time outs,
Sinewy voices from under the earth
Braiding and going straight up
In a faint line.
I modify to simplify,
Complicate to clarify.
If you want to know your faults, marry.
If you want to know your virtues, die.
Then the heroine,
Who resembles you in certain particulars,
Precipitates the suicide
Of the author, wretchedly obscure,
Of that slim but turgid volume,
By letting slip:
Real events don’t have endings,
Only the stories about them do.
(James Galvin [source])
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