Ever since I have read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, I could not forget this passage:
[just before the passage children steal Mrs. Bentley’s photos of when she was young]
“Those children are right,” he would have said. “They stole nothing from you, my dear. These things don’t belong to you here, you now. They belonged to her, that other you, so long ago.”
Oh, thought Mrs. Bentley. And then, as though an ancient phonograph record had been set hissing under a steel needle, she remembered a conversation she had once had with Mr. Bentley — Mr. Bentley, so prim, a pink carnation in his whisk-broomed lapel, saying, “My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You’ve always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They’ll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.”
But Mrs. Bentley had stubbornly kept them.
“It won’t work,” Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. “No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”
Every now and then, I keep thinking about these simple, truthful words and the more I do that the more I identify with Mrs. Bentley.
I do not understand time… Actually this is a lie…
Theoretically, I understand that living in the future and getting hurt by the past is just a mere excuse to not do anything in the present. I understand that the notion of time is an invention and that Past and Future are illusions. And still, these illusions put an extreme pressure on me.
I daydream all day long about what I could have done yesterday and what I will become tomorrow. And I do not grasp anything in the Present, which in the end becomes a regret of the Past.
As a child, I had no knowledge of Time. But growing up, I had been told again and again that “time flies” and that I need to enjoy what I currently have. The issue is that those that kept telling me this lived in the Past. They wanted to be children again and be liberated of the prison of Time. How could I take their advice seriously when they were not following it themselves?
And now I am doing the exact same thing to younger humans.
This is a vicious circle and I know I am not that strong-willed to break it, but I have this tiny hope that in a (not so) distant future, we will stop teaching Time to children and become free again.
