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by Alan Lightman In the months leading up to Einstein's theory about time being relative, he dreams about worlds where time is constructed in different ways. Apart from being somewhat entertaining, these short stories tell a lot about human nature. For instance, in one of those worlds people live at the center of time, where time moves neither backwards nor forwards, but stands still or almost still. This is the place where mothers go with their children, so that they won't grow old and leave them, and where lovers go to find eternal love, forever caught up in an embrace. Wonderful, one might think. But the problem is that the people living at the center of time don't experience it. It is a sort of death, or coma. Since time is standing still, you don't experience anything. In the surrounding world, thousands of years pass, but at the center of time people are only experiencing it as a few seconds. And should it be that they never enter the exact center, but move one step every hundred years or so, so that they can go back, what the lovers will find when they do is that the world has changed, that all their friends have gone, and they start blaming each other. The eternal love they were looking for fades, because to them it has only lasted a few months. They slip apart and grow old and bitter in a world where they don't belong. I thought it was a pretty brilliant way to describe man's vanity, and what it might lead to. |
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