A Place Where Time Stands Still
Written in 2004. For Dr. Batin's English class. I wrote better as a freshie.
Assignment: personal reflection
A Place Where Time Stands Still
Character, history and philosophy. These are characteristics that almost any place can boast of. But in the place where time stands sill, these are just a couple of weapons in its arsenal poised to capture the heart of any wanderer. Many cities and places in the world have more than one name. Few tough, have a history and culture that are as dynamic and relevant as London. A plank of contrast though pricks like a thorn as I realize that life in London, a place lacking a definition, time is still. For life in a foreign land creates a stasis in time, knowing what takes place and not when and how fast it takes place matters more.
The English capital on the Thames was founded during the Roman Invasion in 43 AD. It is home to Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Wembley Stadium, Lord’s Cricket Grounds and Wimbledon. Almost at every street corner and in every five mile radius, one will easily find a museum nearby. It may be one of the most esteemed, or it may be just another local shrine to the local idiosyncrasy. It is with this incredible passion for the past, an adherence to the way it was, with an attitude that guarantees an evolution of the past into the future, that I had come to love this place. And what is London if not shopping? From couture to bargain base and market scrawl, the choices are without limit. In terms of infrastructure, London is a mix of old and new. In the expanse of pop culture, London has no parallel. The Beatles, the Spice Girls, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones, they are just bristles in the toothbrush that is this city’s importance. Literature, however, is a different matter altogether. Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, these are just some of the greats that have looked to this city and found its muse. Celebrities that pique the interests of the multitude and the cult have called this home too: Princess Diana and her poster boy sons, David Beckham and his right foot and the disarming James Bond and even Mr. Bean. All passions and perks can be quelled ad calmed by this city’s unbelievable power. In the end, what this place is, is one without definition because a person has an inimitable insight into this carnival and festival of life, beauty and culture that is London. To attempt to define its significance to the world is nearly impossible and it is with this belief that I succumb to the most personal desire to grasp, it’s meaning in my life.
For a city steeped in history. Not only of its country but of the story of humanity, it is ironic that the Londoner in me cannot grasp it in its entirety. Heathrow Airport, in West Greater London is the world’s busiest airport, where more people pass in a year that in any other place in the world. Of the mass of people who disembark at Heathrow, many are tourists. Of those many are on packaged trips where they spend an entire two days lugging cameras and brochures from one Kodak moment to another. Of those many will sample the red double-decker buses, the black cabs and the Underground. They will get lost in the blurring shapes of travelers simply stilled whilst in motion until the halt of their destination stations. They will inevitably walk at a quicker pace, to dodge being stampeded by the seemingly caffeine loaded commuter. But in al their haste, in their entire trip and in moving from point A to point B, the faceless tourists of Heathrow, miss the lecture in the classroom because they are dazzled and frazzled by the hustle and bustle of the impressive halls of the school. Intending to encapsulate London culture, most miss out on its eccentric charm. Knowledge, lifted straight from an unfeeling travel guide, incarcerates he who sought to pay homage to the city. They bar themselves from experiencing London in its naked self, stripped of its labels. They have seen it, they have examined it, but they have not felt it. The knowledge of a Londoner is vast. It is so relative, it is biased and it is blatantly proud.
London is a place where time stands still no because time does not exist. Neither is it because I lacked a time telling device of any sort. The reason is down to this: in my life there, time hardly mattered. My stay there often feels like something off a dream. A utopia that is far from one’s reaches. Like an Eve thrust into the real world betraying God in Eden. I know I was there. I knew those days were true. But time stood still because I was there, nothing else occurred other than what happened there. The life I left in the Philippines, the person I was in the Philippines, was waiting for me to come back.
I am not glorifying London nor am I vilifying the Philippines. After all it was in England where my pride and self belief in my country’s heritage were repeatedly questioned. Often I do not want people to call me Hannah. They ask me why so, given that it is a pretty name and for no reason and for every reason I find that, time and time again I exclaim “that name’s reserved for London friends”. I wonder what the reason is for my seeming inability to reconcile the two lives. It has to do with what my life was like when I left for London. It was perhaps the darkest and the most turbulent times in our life as a family. We had spent the previous summer apart. It was a painful time in my parent’s marriage. Its effects pandering to me and my sisters, we suffered so much pain and shed as many tears and have shuddered in fear. We were not restricted to pain and tears but exposed to actual conflict, real and live physical and emotional hurt, scarring, scalding and burning my skin, my only protection. Time stood still because time did not matter. Its passage paled in comparison to the sudden reverberations my family went through in our stay there. We had started from the broken shards of nothing, picking up pieces that scratched our hands but the action was needed to survive recreating a shattered past. I was a child when I went there, with hardly any cares or qualms for this world. But the longer I stayed, the longer I felt the drum beating call of my own homeland, I heard it in the questions of friends about the Philippines and I confronted it in my answers. I do not know why, but it is only now that I have come to realize how naïve I had pictured life back then. I was expecting to come back to the Philippines I had left. The land of Palibhasa Lalake and Robinson’s Galleria and the Backstreet Boys. What I saw when I came back was Galle, Whattamen and Westlife. In my stay in London, I had been living in this time warp. It was like existing in this bubble where one emerges half expecting people to be the same, to be exactly the same, that the friendships I once left were ready to picked up where they had been left off.
London is a place that brought so much contrasting feelings to the brim of my consciousness. For all my palpable passion anything London, I too find great fault with it. On dark days wherein the skies belie the truth of the time of day, my heart wells a dark hatred for the city. What great power has it in me that allows love to tug at its heart with no intention of ceasing? Frequently, I adore it with the warmth of a cup of hot chocolate on a stormy day and sometimes I hate it with a fire of a thousand suns. I resent it because it fosters in me this traitorous hope that it was the city of my birth, that I had no life in some cluster of islands an antipode away. But I love it all the same because there I stood amongst others and declared without shame, my ethnicity. In the alienation of being in a foreign land, I distinctly identified myself as a Filipino, with all my faults and flaws. I wore my nationality like a badge, each day. Knowing life in it, it is so easy to compare its jewels and castles to the Manila’s shanties and potholes. It made me want to go home and stay at the same time. It is a place where time passes so rapidly without notice of its passage in my mind. It was a place to me where time was dead, time was without essence, it had no value for it was not greater than the events and the dealings that transpired in the expanse of the its embrace. It was a wonderful life. But it had to end. I had said my goodbyes. The memories are vivid in my heart and I seldom speak of them, because to reminisce means to admit that those days are gone, that those people no longer belong in my life, that that place holds no more power in me. In all the confusion I find one truth: that I am this person, a romantic aware of the realities of the world because of the place where time stands still. I still fear going back. I expect too much of the place that I fell in love with. My romance with London seemingly belonging to the past but truthfully having more to do with my future is something that I have only begun to comprehend.
All these factors, of missing home, of loving England, contributed to the stasis in time. The duality of London, of past and future mirrored the duality in my life that caused the disorientation with time. The past was the Philippines and the future was uncertain and I recoiled from the possibility of change. I feared intensely what I knew it would mean. The stasis existed because I feared change. I felt comforted by uncertainty and indecision. In my mind nothing had to change and time did not matter. I did not want to let go of either place as I had begun to know it. Time did not exist because I wanted to keep my notion of my homeland. Time did not exist because I did not want to be released from the clutches of the home I had come to know. Will I ever go back and be a faceless tourist in the blurry landscape? When will I find the courage to burst the time bubble? It is a question for which I have no certain answer. It is a question for whose answer exists only between me and the place where time stands still.
Assignment: personal reflection
A Place Where Time Stands Still
Character, history and philosophy. These are characteristics that almost any place can boast of. But in the place where time stands sill, these are just a couple of weapons in its arsenal poised to capture the heart of any wanderer. Many cities and places in the world have more than one name. Few tough, have a history and culture that are as dynamic and relevant as London. A plank of contrast though pricks like a thorn as I realize that life in London, a place lacking a definition, time is still. For life in a foreign land creates a stasis in time, knowing what takes place and not when and how fast it takes place matters more.
The English capital on the Thames was founded during the Roman Invasion in 43 AD. It is home to Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Wembley Stadium, Lord’s Cricket Grounds and Wimbledon. Almost at every street corner and in every five mile radius, one will easily find a museum nearby. It may be one of the most esteemed, or it may be just another local shrine to the local idiosyncrasy. It is with this incredible passion for the past, an adherence to the way it was, with an attitude that guarantees an evolution of the past into the future, that I had come to love this place. And what is London if not shopping? From couture to bargain base and market scrawl, the choices are without limit. In terms of infrastructure, London is a mix of old and new. In the expanse of pop culture, London has no parallel. The Beatles, the Spice Girls, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones, they are just bristles in the toothbrush that is this city’s importance. Literature, however, is a different matter altogether. Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, these are just some of the greats that have looked to this city and found its muse. Celebrities that pique the interests of the multitude and the cult have called this home too: Princess Diana and her poster boy sons, David Beckham and his right foot and the disarming James Bond and even Mr. Bean. All passions and perks can be quelled ad calmed by this city’s unbelievable power. In the end, what this place is, is one without definition because a person has an inimitable insight into this carnival and festival of life, beauty and culture that is London. To attempt to define its significance to the world is nearly impossible and it is with this belief that I succumb to the most personal desire to grasp, it’s meaning in my life.
For a city steeped in history. Not only of its country but of the story of humanity, it is ironic that the Londoner in me cannot grasp it in its entirety. Heathrow Airport, in West Greater London is the world’s busiest airport, where more people pass in a year that in any other place in the world. Of the mass of people who disembark at Heathrow, many are tourists. Of those many are on packaged trips where they spend an entire two days lugging cameras and brochures from one Kodak moment to another. Of those many will sample the red double-decker buses, the black cabs and the Underground. They will get lost in the blurring shapes of travelers simply stilled whilst in motion until the halt of their destination stations. They will inevitably walk at a quicker pace, to dodge being stampeded by the seemingly caffeine loaded commuter. But in al their haste, in their entire trip and in moving from point A to point B, the faceless tourists of Heathrow, miss the lecture in the classroom because they are dazzled and frazzled by the hustle and bustle of the impressive halls of the school. Intending to encapsulate London culture, most miss out on its eccentric charm. Knowledge, lifted straight from an unfeeling travel guide, incarcerates he who sought to pay homage to the city. They bar themselves from experiencing London in its naked self, stripped of its labels. They have seen it, they have examined it, but they have not felt it. The knowledge of a Londoner is vast. It is so relative, it is biased and it is blatantly proud.
London is a place where time stands still no because time does not exist. Neither is it because I lacked a time telling device of any sort. The reason is down to this: in my life there, time hardly mattered. My stay there often feels like something off a dream. A utopia that is far from one’s reaches. Like an Eve thrust into the real world betraying God in Eden. I know I was there. I knew those days were true. But time stood still because I was there, nothing else occurred other than what happened there. The life I left in the Philippines, the person I was in the Philippines, was waiting for me to come back.
I am not glorifying London nor am I vilifying the Philippines. After all it was in England where my pride and self belief in my country’s heritage were repeatedly questioned. Often I do not want people to call me Hannah. They ask me why so, given that it is a pretty name and for no reason and for every reason I find that, time and time again I exclaim “that name’s reserved for London friends”. I wonder what the reason is for my seeming inability to reconcile the two lives. It has to do with what my life was like when I left for London. It was perhaps the darkest and the most turbulent times in our life as a family. We had spent the previous summer apart. It was a painful time in my parent’s marriage. Its effects pandering to me and my sisters, we suffered so much pain and shed as many tears and have shuddered in fear. We were not restricted to pain and tears but exposed to actual conflict, real and live physical and emotional hurt, scarring, scalding and burning my skin, my only protection. Time stood still because time did not matter. Its passage paled in comparison to the sudden reverberations my family went through in our stay there. We had started from the broken shards of nothing, picking up pieces that scratched our hands but the action was needed to survive recreating a shattered past. I was a child when I went there, with hardly any cares or qualms for this world. But the longer I stayed, the longer I felt the drum beating call of my own homeland, I heard it in the questions of friends about the Philippines and I confronted it in my answers. I do not know why, but it is only now that I have come to realize how naïve I had pictured life back then. I was expecting to come back to the Philippines I had left. The land of Palibhasa Lalake and Robinson’s Galleria and the Backstreet Boys. What I saw when I came back was Galle, Whattamen and Westlife. In my stay in London, I had been living in this time warp. It was like existing in this bubble where one emerges half expecting people to be the same, to be exactly the same, that the friendships I once left were ready to picked up where they had been left off.
London is a place that brought so much contrasting feelings to the brim of my consciousness. For all my palpable passion anything London, I too find great fault with it. On dark days wherein the skies belie the truth of the time of day, my heart wells a dark hatred for the city. What great power has it in me that allows love to tug at its heart with no intention of ceasing? Frequently, I adore it with the warmth of a cup of hot chocolate on a stormy day and sometimes I hate it with a fire of a thousand suns. I resent it because it fosters in me this traitorous hope that it was the city of my birth, that I had no life in some cluster of islands an antipode away. But I love it all the same because there I stood amongst others and declared without shame, my ethnicity. In the alienation of being in a foreign land, I distinctly identified myself as a Filipino, with all my faults and flaws. I wore my nationality like a badge, each day. Knowing life in it, it is so easy to compare its jewels and castles to the Manila’s shanties and potholes. It made me want to go home and stay at the same time. It is a place where time passes so rapidly without notice of its passage in my mind. It was a place to me where time was dead, time was without essence, it had no value for it was not greater than the events and the dealings that transpired in the expanse of the its embrace. It was a wonderful life. But it had to end. I had said my goodbyes. The memories are vivid in my heart and I seldom speak of them, because to reminisce means to admit that those days are gone, that those people no longer belong in my life, that that place holds no more power in me. In all the confusion I find one truth: that I am this person, a romantic aware of the realities of the world because of the place where time stands still. I still fear going back. I expect too much of the place that I fell in love with. My romance with London seemingly belonging to the past but truthfully having more to do with my future is something that I have only begun to comprehend.
All these factors, of missing home, of loving England, contributed to the stasis in time. The duality of London, of past and future mirrored the duality in my life that caused the disorientation with time. The past was the Philippines and the future was uncertain and I recoiled from the possibility of change. I feared intensely what I knew it would mean. The stasis existed because I feared change. I felt comforted by uncertainty and indecision. In my mind nothing had to change and time did not matter. I did not want to let go of either place as I had begun to know it. Time did not exist because I wanted to keep my notion of my homeland. Time did not exist because I did not want to be released from the clutches of the home I had come to know. Will I ever go back and be a faceless tourist in the blurry landscape? When will I find the courage to burst the time bubble? It is a question for which I have no certain answer. It is a question for whose answer exists only between me and the place where time stands still.