How interesting... There's a poem by T.S. Elliot you've probably heard at least a few lines from somewhere as it's quoted frequently. It goes:
Time present and time past?Are both perhaps present in time future?And time future contained in time past.?If all time is eternally present?All time is unredeemable.?What might have been is an abstraction?Remaining a perpetual possibility?Only in a world of speculation.?What might have been and what has been?Point to one end, which is always present.
I myself buy into this particular reasoning. I even wrote a really horrible poem that does not bear repeating about it. I make no claims on knowing the future but as far as events that have already occurred, well, the proof that something had to happen the way it did, when it did, is evidenced by the fact that that's the way it happened. There's a lot of interesting debate on collapsing wave forms, time-travel paradoxes, and even a 'many worlds' theory that deals with could've beens, might've beens, and where these alternate endings go to or what they amount to but I'm quite sure I don't know enough about any of that. Which is good because I usually start thinking this way when I need to will myself out of depression:
"Well, if THAT hadn't happened then something else would've happened, leading to something else that's better than this.... Hypothetically, yes. But if we lived in a realm where hypothetical situations had anything to do with what happens in the real world then we'd all have been stuck on an island deciding which one of our friends to eat long ago."
You get the point.
Anyway, I just finished McCarthy's No Country For Old Men and this 'unredeemable time' concept comes up as justification for murder. And not for the first time. Alright, T.S. Elliot was a loose cannon but why for fucksakes must novelists keep proposing that serial killers think the same way I do ...namely that, it's alright for you to die because if you were meant to live then fate wouldn't have brought them with a loaded pistol to your doorstep and you wouldn't have stood there like a deer in headlights while they shot you in the face.
Jesus, so much for fatalism as the new Prozac.
p.s. The poem is called Burnt Norton if you feel like looking it up. It's long enough to give a super-hero time to bag a villain, save the world, and have dinner with the govenor.
Time present and time past?Are both perhaps present in time future?And time future contained in time past.?If all time is eternally present?All time is unredeemable.?What might have been is an abstraction?Remaining a perpetual possibility?Only in a world of speculation.?What might have been and what has been?Point to one end, which is always present.
I myself buy into this particular reasoning. I even wrote a really horrible poem that does not bear repeating about it. I make no claims on knowing the future but as far as events that have already occurred, well, the proof that something had to happen the way it did, when it did, is evidenced by the fact that that's the way it happened. There's a lot of interesting debate on collapsing wave forms, time-travel paradoxes, and even a 'many worlds' theory that deals with could've beens, might've beens, and where these alternate endings go to or what they amount to but I'm quite sure I don't know enough about any of that. Which is good because I usually start thinking this way when I need to will myself out of depression:
"Well, if THAT hadn't happened then something else would've happened, leading to something else that's better than this.... Hypothetically, yes. But if we lived in a realm where hypothetical situations had anything to do with what happens in the real world then we'd all have been stuck on an island deciding which one of our friends to eat long ago."
You get the point.
Anyway, I just finished McCarthy's No Country For Old Men and this 'unredeemable time' concept comes up as justification for murder. And not for the first time. Alright, T.S. Elliot was a loose cannon but why for fucksakes must novelists keep proposing that serial killers think the same way I do ...namely that, it's alright for you to die because if you were meant to live then fate wouldn't have brought them with a loaded pistol to your doorstep and you wouldn't have stood there like a deer in headlights while they shot you in the face.
Jesus, so much for fatalism as the new Prozac.
p.s. The poem is called Burnt Norton if you feel like looking it up. It's long enough to give a super-hero time to bag a villain, save the world, and have dinner with the govenor.