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Du temps perdu

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I'm learning a few non-scientific truths along the way. If you're older than me, or simply wiser, you'll be familiar with all these already, but I thought I'd share (pro), if only to fill up the space between the pictures with some text. Absente such platitudes, you might have to put up with more nonsensical Latin (...Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua, or some such...), since I can't stand reading blog posts that consist only of poorly placed snapshots. There should be some interesting narrative, I suppose, otherwise one might as well use Facebook or Picasa.
So (!), what I've realized in the past few weeks is that time—or perhaps, my experience of it (assuming there to be a difference, I haven't fully given up on realism yet)—is not a local train going about its regular, regulated, business, but a roller-coaster (Universal Studios Style). After a slow patch in my late 40s, when (presumably) the car I'm travelling in was being ratcheted up for the last great drop—or perhaps we'll go round again after this—after that dragging time, anyway, there were a few weeks of heady-light-headyness when time briefly paused and fluttered gently at the top of the incline... The week in Cushendun with my sister and her family (when this picture of Justin was taken) marked the onset of this quietened Time. And then everything speeded up as I could never have believed possible: the past month has gone in as a day or two previously; each time I stop for breath, it's the weekend again, then Tuesday—Mondays have disappeared almost without trace—soon, it will be Sean's 'Fall Break' (which sounds more like a serial verb construction than a half-term holiday, as my recollection of North American life rushes down the plughole along with much else in the middle past), then Christmas, then 2013,4,5...


The other familiar fact about the non-linearity of temporal experience (given that phrase, perhaps the mock Latin would have been better!) that I'm only just becoming acquainted with is that once time picks up speed early memories become increasingly vivid and clear. I got an email from Stay Friends.de the other day, asking me if I still remembered some school friends from a boarding school in Germany (the gruesomely named Landerziehungsheim Gut Honneroth) where I spent my 'gap year' in 1981—before the description of time spent abroad had been given been reified in the popular imagination—working as an English assistant. I remembered them all as though it were five years ago. But then, five years ago, before the train began to plunge towards the water, and the flash grabbed our excited horror in the tunnel before the splash, I doubt that any of them would have been familiar at all.

It's a funny old thing, Time. Telepathy, too :)


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