Friday, December 3, 2010
Inquiry Project
The inquiry project has confirmed one belief I hold. Nothing in this world is standard. The three books I chose to read for this project, Catch-22, Time's Arrow, and Slaughterhouse V, all deal with the concept of non-linear narrative. This means time is reversed, flipped around, or rearranged. The thesis of my essays on these books has been that time should be accepted the way it is, and not twisted. However, I'm starting to think Slaughterhouse V is an exception. The story follows Billy Pilgrim, a decorated war veteran, alien hostage, and successful businessman. He has become "unstuck in time," meaning he can rearrange it however he pleases. This is the manner in which the story is told. It seems that it's not a bad thing in this plot. He has control. It's not like I've anticipated in other books. In those and in real life, time is either forwards, backwards, or random. Slaughterhouse V is proving that it may be confusing, but treating time as a manipulable fourth dimension isn't so bad. I haven't reached the end, but this seems like a good conclusion thus far. I wonder how I'm going to present what I've learned.
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I suspect that time is sort of imaginary. I think that we actually CREATE time through our measurements of it. Example: The most basic way most people measure time is through seconds, or ticks on the clock. These are approximate measures, because when we're talking about the real world there are no "edges" to a second--there's no such thing as a "moment" or "slice of time" in real life because real life isn't like a movie made up of millions of individual frames. There are no frames--it's just a continuous flow.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, we measure time through seconds. If we didn't have clocks, what would we measure the passage of time by? Probably the growth of plants or children, or the tides of the ocean or the phase of the moon. What if we didn't have those? What if no events occurred at all and there were no beings in the universe? No objects? Just a vacuum? Time would not exist--nothing would be happening. So events create time.
Slaughterhouse V is a great book. It is very raw without being over the top vulgar and makes great points about time. I love the description of how we see time, stuck to a train, seeing through a 12ft pipe an inch thick, looking at mountains, unaware that we are on a train moving at whatever direction it wants.
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