The march of time
Time is a strange thing indeed. People often say "time heals all wounds", but really it is not a process of healing but a process of forgetting. Pain and pleasure fading away into the mist of memory. I was struck today by a metaphor in Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent book Blue Mars. One character, Michel Duval, returns from Mars to his home town in Provence, France and is confronted by how much his memory has faded in the 100 years since had had last been there. He conceives of the passing of time and memory as being a kind of reincarnation, and endless reinvention of the self, old selves like past lives receding into the haze of time. Here is the passage:
He stepped up onto the broken wall of the mas, tried to remember more of the place, of his life here with Eve. Deliberate recall, a hunt for the past... Instead scenes came to him of the life he had shared with Maya in Odessa, with Spencer down the hall. Probably the two lives had shared enough aspects to create the confusion. Eve had been hot-tempered like Maya, and as for the rest, la vie quotidienne was la vie quotidienne, in all times and all places, especially for a specific individual no doubt, settling into his habits as if into furniture, taken along from one place to the next. Perhaps.
The inside walls of this house had been clean beige plaster, tacked with prints. Now the patches of plaster left were rough and discolored, like the exterior walls of an old church. Eve had worked in the kitchen like a dancer in a routine, her back and legs long and powerful. Looking over her shoulder at him to laugh, her chestnut hair tossing with every turn. Yes, he remembered that repeated moment. An image without context. He had been in love. Although he had made her angry. Eventually she had left him someone else, ah yes, a teacher in Uzes. What pain! He remembered it, but it meant nothing to him now, he felt not a pinch of it. A previous life. These ruins could not make him feel it. They scarcely brought back even the images. It was frightening -- as if reincarnation were real, and had happened to him, so that he was experiencing minute flashbacks of a life separated from him by several subsequent deaths. how odd it would be if such reincarnation were real, speaking in languages one did not know; feeling the swirl of the past through the mind, feeling previous existences... well. It would feel just like this, in fact. But to re-experience nothing of those past feelings, to feel nothing except the sensation that one was not feeling... (p. 228-229)
Then a few weeks later:
He stumbled out of the cafe from his past to his car, and drove home under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to their ruined mas, all without thinking; and he walked out to it again helplessly, as if the house might have sprung back into being. But it was still the same dusty ruin by the olive grove. And he sat on the wall, feeling blank.
That Michel Duval was gone. This one would go too. He would live into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here the first time. Flashes, images -- a man sitting on a broken wall, no feeling involved. Nothing more than that. So this Michel too would go.
The olive trees waved their arms, gray green, green gray. Good-bye, good-bye. They were no help this time, they have him no euphoric connection with lost time; that moment too was past. (p236)
I had my own moment of remembrance yesterday. Chris was in town visiting and wanted to get copies of all my old pictures from college because he had lost his in a hard-drive crash. Going through old pictures from Sophomore year was such a strange feeling -- at once deja vu and alien at the same time. The pictures from four years ago were a window onto another me, one that I could scarcely recall. In fact I had to stare long and hard at many pictures to even remember their context. That Owen of sophomore year. An Owen before Arielle, before booz allen, before my current group of friends. Then pictures of the three years with Arielle, a time now six months gone, another life past. I'm not sure whether it is a melancholy thought to realize that so much of life is fleeting or a liberating one. But I think Michel is right; ". This one would go too. He would live into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here the first time."
It really highlights the importance of journaling of consciously transmuting ephemeral thoughts into timeless written words. A preserving of past lives for use by future incarnations of one's self. To be honest, the themes are very similar to those of Planescape: Torment, which I described in an earlier entry. While that game featured literal reincarnation of an immortal, I think there is great truth in the notion that we can be reborn without ever dying. Changed by the very transience of thought.
He stepped up onto the broken wall of the mas, tried to remember more of the place, of his life here with Eve. Deliberate recall, a hunt for the past... Instead scenes came to him of the life he had shared with Maya in Odessa, with Spencer down the hall. Probably the two lives had shared enough aspects to create the confusion. Eve had been hot-tempered like Maya, and as for the rest, la vie quotidienne was la vie quotidienne, in all times and all places, especially for a specific individual no doubt, settling into his habits as if into furniture, taken along from one place to the next. Perhaps.
The inside walls of this house had been clean beige plaster, tacked with prints. Now the patches of plaster left were rough and discolored, like the exterior walls of an old church. Eve had worked in the kitchen like a dancer in a routine, her back and legs long and powerful. Looking over her shoulder at him to laugh, her chestnut hair tossing with every turn. Yes, he remembered that repeated moment. An image without context. He had been in love. Although he had made her angry. Eventually she had left him someone else, ah yes, a teacher in Uzes. What pain! He remembered it, but it meant nothing to him now, he felt not a pinch of it. A previous life. These ruins could not make him feel it. They scarcely brought back even the images. It was frightening -- as if reincarnation were real, and had happened to him, so that he was experiencing minute flashbacks of a life separated from him by several subsequent deaths. how odd it would be if such reincarnation were real, speaking in languages one did not know; feeling the swirl of the past through the mind, feeling previous existences... well. It would feel just like this, in fact. But to re-experience nothing of those past feelings, to feel nothing except the sensation that one was not feeling... (p. 228-229)
Then a few weeks later:
He stumbled out of the cafe from his past to his car, and drove home under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to their ruined mas, all without thinking; and he walked out to it again helplessly, as if the house might have sprung back into being. But it was still the same dusty ruin by the olive grove. And he sat on the wall, feeling blank.
That Michel Duval was gone. This one would go too. He would live into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here the first time. Flashes, images -- a man sitting on a broken wall, no feeling involved. Nothing more than that. So this Michel too would go.
The olive trees waved their arms, gray green, green gray. Good-bye, good-bye. They were no help this time, they have him no euphoric connection with lost time; that moment too was past. (p236)
I had my own moment of remembrance yesterday. Chris was in town visiting and wanted to get copies of all my old pictures from college because he had lost his in a hard-drive crash. Going through old pictures from Sophomore year was such a strange feeling -- at once deja vu and alien at the same time. The pictures from four years ago were a window onto another me, one that I could scarcely recall. In fact I had to stare long and hard at many pictures to even remember their context. That Owen of sophomore year. An Owen before Arielle, before booz allen, before my current group of friends. Then pictures of the three years with Arielle, a time now six months gone, another life past. I'm not sure whether it is a melancholy thought to realize that so much of life is fleeting or a liberating one. But I think Michel is right; ". This one would go too. He would live into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here the first time."
It really highlights the importance of journaling of consciously transmuting ephemeral thoughts into timeless written words. A preserving of past lives for use by future incarnations of one's self. To be honest, the themes are very similar to those of Planescape: Torment, which I described in an earlier entry. While that game featured literal reincarnation of an immortal, I think there is great truth in the notion that we can be reborn without ever dying. Changed by the very transience of thought.