The Overabundance of Time
"There wasn't really time for us to get to know one another in the first place ..." she said sadly, though it was not certain that the sadness she used belonged to her, or whether it was just an emotion she had chanced upon second-hand, and now offered up impulsively, as if she had nothing else with which to fill the void.
“There wasn’t really time for us …” she said. But this is precisely the opposite of the problem. It’s not that there isn't enough time; it’s precisely that there is always an overabundance of it, an inconsiderate excess. Even where our encounters are fleeting, briefer than the beat of a mayfly's wing, -- even where they are little more than blurs upon a retina, snapshots snatched in passing -- from a train, a chance word, the definitive percussiveness of a closing door, -- even *here* there is always time, more time than we can spend, more time than we can make sense of.
And so, when we come to this experience of one another, we know not by way of economy but by way of surfeit. Those characteristic gestures for which we wait -- in a waiting of which we are only conscious by dint of the many images we suspend, the words, the emotions, all flailing in the ether, intent upon some finally incontestable form -- come not once, but time and time again, effortless and therefore impossible to annul. Each thing falls in its rightful place, identity passes and repasses, yet it presses so hard in repetition upon itself that its own shadow becomes buried far beneath the soil; and however softly we take hands together by way of parting, it is the geology of our own lives that we drag out of shape.
Come the evening and time‘s own change of heart -- today, it seems, time no longer passes but endures -- we have it within us nonetheless, having spent the opportunities we had, to remain unequal to our time, and thereby to live placably with it the longer. To do this, one must set one’s face askance, so that the patter of time falls laterally -- it does not matter “laterally with respect to *what*?” -- just laterally, like small dry sticks or pieces of mud upon a roof, small dry sticks hurled from urchins upon a cloud, a yieldless blossom perpendicular to every plane of active influence.
