11/14/2023 0 Comments Children of a dead earthtime warp![]() ![]() ![]() Without memory the sentence you are reading now would not make sense. The effect comes from the order in which you read its words: a reader must remember what she has read before and make connections to what she reads next. If one were to read a novel random page by random page, the novel would not have its intended effect. ![]() Memory is essential to storytelling because stories exist in time. My life only made sense if my wife was alive. How had the last 13 years turned me into an only parent of two young children, owner of a house in the suburbs of a Midwestern city with a job that paid too little to send the kids to child care? It didn’t seem possible that I’d made those choices. My past didn’t seem to connect to my present. When my wife died, my life was thrown out of time. Strangers constantly ask you to tell the story of how you met, so that the past becomes the time in which you didn’t know each other. You learn each other’s schedules, when to call, when to eat together, who picks up the kids on which day, who has an appointment when. In a way, a marriage is two people living in a single time. What I mean is: I didn’t remember that she was dead, I remembered that I was alone. I would be about to call out to her when I would remember who I was now. It seemed as if the only reason I couldn’t go back in time was that I didn’t know where time was.Īfter the funeral, I would play with our kids in the apartment we’d rented, and feel her presence in the other room. Time was the only distance life felt close by. To touch her still body, completely different and yet barely changed, was to be aware that a moment is all that stands between life and death. This summer, when my wife died in her Korean hometown, I held her lifeless hand and thought: Let me go back just one minute. It wasn’t like going to a friend’s house - I didn’t know where my birth parents were in Korea, or even who they were, or how to speak to them. My parents would tell me to try it, to go back if I wanted to. I was really asking for reassurance that I had one. In the worst fights with my parents, I would threaten to return to Korea to my “real” family. I doubt I knew what a prostitute was - I knew only how people looked at me when they said the word, like I should be afraid of myself. I imagined a me the same age as I was, whose birth mother had kept him even if it made her life more difficult. As a child I tried to imagine myself in this second scenario, not because it seemed better, but because I wanted to belong. I had been told that my birth mother was likely a prostitute, and that in my non-adopted life I would be poor and hungry and likely a prostitute too. Recently I realized that I was reading books about time because I wanted one to tell me how to go back in time - to before my wife died of cancer. Either they told me to “go back to my country” or they demanded my gratitude for sharing theirs. The latter time was always with me - people often reminded me that I was living a borrowed life. As an adoptee I grew up with a constant awareness of two times: one in which I lived and another in which I would have lived if not for my adoption. It does not change time, only reminds one that time has passed. In mourning, memory is only another cause for mourning. For us, or at least in our section of the universe, time operates in only one direction.Īs consolation, Rovelli offers the mind as a time machine - we travel via memory. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the total amount of entropy in the universe can never decrease, only increase. So why, my grief asks, can’t we change times simply by changing our perceptions? Rovelli suggests that our linear experience of time is due to thermodynamics. There is no past or future we only experience it this way. If he is right, time is like everything else in the universe and must be made up of extremely tiny particles. Rovelli writes that if identical twins separate early in life and live one in the mountains and one below sea level, then they will find in old age that the one below sea level has aged more, being closer to the center of the planet. Even at different altitudes on Earth, time is different. A space traveler might return to Earth to find that her friends and family have aged more than she has. Time passes more quickly the closer one is to a gravitational mass (like a planet or a star or a black hole). In The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli challenges our concept of time. Recently I realized that I was reading them because I wanted one to tell me how to go back in time - to before my wife died of cancer. I have been reading books about time: theoretical physics, evolution, parallel universes. Matthew Salesses | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,630 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. ![]()
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