Those other times are running elsewhere...

"Oh not because happiness exists, that too hasty profit snatched from approaching loss"

Rilke


Time should teach us all but I am convinced it just teaches us that we make the same mistakes over and over again, like the clock striking twelve, over and over again, each time with the same rhythm and mercilessness as the last. To please time we created the clock. We take comfort in its repetitiveness while whatever we do, decide or choose, always seems to come as a surprise. Yet nowadays the feeling of comfort is being substituted by a feeling of loss. Faster and faster the clock is ticking and instead of running we are standing paralyzed in front of it.

(LB)


"What is it? My dear?"
"Ah, how can we bear it?"
"Bear what?"
"This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?"
"We can be quiet together, and pretend - since it is only the beginning - that we have all the time in the world."
"And every day we shall have less. And then none."
"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"
"No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."

A.S. Byatt, Possession



Love after Love

Time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott


P.S. All quotes from The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger