looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?
*
The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That
it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-
bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the in-
finities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you
a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a
fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know
this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know
it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the
same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of
others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not
English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.
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*
One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you ex-
perience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘pres-
ent’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind
it. As if the present were this car — nice car by the way — and the past is the road
we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten
to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front
bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later
a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what
rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or
rate — which we do, it’s the only way you can — 95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a
minute, etc. — how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One
second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or mov-
ing without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if
there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call
the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s
front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples
and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column
comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if
in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly
wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly
conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped
into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much
to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between im-
pact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made
could restrain — THE END.
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