Day 50: Time, memory, and endings

Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated and perplexed by the construct of time.  The measurement of time, the passage of time.  The idea that time exists as a limitless quantity, as the Rolling Stones famously sang that time is somehow on our side.   We waste it and squander it and tell ourselves that there is always tomorrow. 

Based on the Brit's recommendation, I began reading Julian Barnes' "the sense of an ending" last night and finished the final 18 pages this morning.  I was hooked from the first words to the last sentence on page 163.   At 163 total pages, Barnes' style could be characterized as economical but yet it is so densely packed with exactly the right words that conveyed the fungiblity of time, the fragility of memory, the mirage of change.   

I admire it for both its technical brilliance and its haunting resonance.  Take this passage: ‎"Or perhaps it's that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and the time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?"

It evoked Salvador Dali's the Persistence of Memory with it's melting clocks and warped landscape.