It is late. I sit down on the coach after a shower and Tim, who is buried in the beanbag chair with a notebook and a pencil (same pose as usual when he’s thinking of stories), says to me with excitement in his eyes,
“Hey check this out, I’ve got another idea for a book. I’m gonna write six short stories that are totally unrelated. Some happen in the present, some in the past, and some in the future — and in totally different locations too. Then I’m gonna relate them all in the very end in a way that all the details make sense and connect and all serve as part of a bigger story!”
This thought tickled me, then shocked me with a realization. I’ve figured out where time will go in the future! I mean, I thought time had no future. Okay, slow down a little: back to St. Augustine.
You see, time used to be a linear thing. There was a beginning, and there would be an end. Augustine talked about it in Confessions — the past, present and future. The establishment of Christianity straightened out the concept of time from being a primitive circular pattern (when in agricultural society time was day after day, year after year) to a linear logic. God created the world in the beginning, and it will come to an end when Jesus comes back to end the earthly world.
That was the way stories used to be: from “Once upon a time…” to “…they lived happily ever after.”
Then the pattern changed, again. We see movies like Back to the Future, Run! Lola Run!, Irreversible, popular American TV shows like Lost, Flashforward… Time breaks into pieces, together with a lot of things in the world.
Because the world changed. Time changed. It changed from being a linear logic into fragments, just like the way we do things now: we don’t make a whole machine by ourselves, we make parts of it. We are not ancient craftsmen anymore; we ARE the machines that make machines.
Things fell apart, so did we. Soul and body. Artists portray body parts, a glimpse of things, a moment of feelings… Time is shattered, subverted, disabled.
Now. Now it comes to my realization. If we live in a non-linear time with no past, present and future, where are we going? Do we live in the future already? Can we survive the subversion of time?
Tim’s story idea gave me an answer:
Things evolve back and forth between two extremes. What if it’s time for order again? This time the order is not THE order. Time is being RE-arranged and RE-organized in a subjectively logical way now that it has been subverted. I mean, there are the confusing six stories — at first, unrelated, illogical, non-linear — and this is phase the phase we’re in. Then we jump out of this, escape and carry on. Time will become linear again, or circular, or whatever shape or order. But it’s not going to keep being fragments. The moment is gone.
I figured out where time will go in the future!
It is late. I sit down on the coach after a shower and Tim, who is buried in the beanbag chair with a notebook and a pencil (same pose as usual when he’s thinking of stories), says to me with excitement in his eyes,
“Hey check this out, I’ve got another idea for a book. I’m gonna write six short stories that are totally unrelated. Some happen in the present, some in the past, and some in the future — and in totally different locations too. Then I’m gonna relate them all in the very end in a way that all the details make sense and connect and all serve as part of a bigger story!”
This thought tickled me, then shocked me with a realization. I’ve figured out where time will go in the future! I mean, I thought time had no future. Okay, slow down a little: back to St. Augustine.
You see, time used to be a linear thing. There was a beginning, and there would be an end. Augustine talked about it in Confessions — the past, present and future. The establishment of Christianity straightened out the concept of time from being a primitive circular pattern (when in agricultural society time was day after day, year after year) to a linear logic. God created the world in the beginning, and it will come to an end when Jesus comes back to end the earthly world.
That was the way stories used to be: from “Once upon a time…” to “…they lived happily ever after.”
Then the pattern changed, again. We see movies like Back to the Future, Run! Lola Run!, Irreversible, popular American TV shows like Lost, Flashforward… Time breaks into pieces, together with a lot of things in the world.
Because the world changed. Time changed. It changed from being a linear logic into fragments, just like the way we do things now: we don’t make a whole machine by ourselves, we make parts of it. We are not ancient craftsmen anymore; we ARE the machines that make machines.
Things fell apart, so did we. Soul and body. Artists portray body parts, a glimpse of things, a moment of feelings… Time is shattered, subverted, disabled.
Now. Now it comes to my realization. If we live in a non-linear time with no past, present and future, where are we going? Do we live in the future already? Can we survive the subversion of time?
Tim’s story idea gave me an answer:
Things evolve back and forth between two extremes. What if it’s time for order again? This time the order is not THE order. Time is being RE-arranged and RE-organized in a subjectively logical way now that it has been subverted. I mean, there are the confusing six stories — at first, unrelated, illogical, non-linear — and this is phase the phase we’re in. Then we jump out of this, escape and carry on. Time will become linear again, or circular, or whatever shape or order. But it’s not going to keep being fragments. The moment is gone.