Time passing is a strange and contradictory thing. It would be reasonable to think that time that has hung upon it nothing, that has nothing between it’s poles but emptiness, might last forever. That moments devoid of anything stretch out into boredom or anxiety or worse yet loneliness, a whistle of a tumbleweed blowing slowly across the plain of mind, with nothing ever to shake itself loose. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
But really, it is the events of life, the drama, the tension, the birth and the death, that gives time it’s weightlessness and its gravity all at once, that pulls us into an amber that seems to last moments strung far too long, that gives us memory of things, that breaks us into tiny pieces of stringing it all together as something we should remember, that we have to remember. Those moments that shape us like a collection of pennies in a jar or a collection of buttons in the bottom of a drawer, our shape and our substance dictated not by who we are right now, but by who we were and who we weren’t (perhaps some of the buttons taken away) and how we came exactly to land right here in shape and sound and space, the needle of us dropped onto a record spinning forward.
It’s this sort of thought, inspired by Chapter 7 paragraph 2 of East of Eden. How it dropped from the heavens into my hands, only the gods understand.