Yes,
time! The age-old theme. À la recherche du
temps
perdu …Valentin Louis Georges Eugène
Marcel
Proust needed a vast number of pages
to
write about it. Cesar needs only eight words
in
three lines to do the same. One thinks of us
humans
being caught by the Newtonian time.
What
I call the Indian Time might be the mother
time
of all times. Clocks can lose time. We only
waste
it. With tide it waits for no man. Time is
relentless.
Time is indifferent. But time is also
a
healer. Time can sometimes solve problems
for
us, too. We can readily answer if someone
asks
what time is it now, by looking at our watch
or clock.
However, we haven’t got a foggest idea
if he asks what is time.
The
definition of ‘antique’ is as vague as that
of
‘classic’. In Latin, it just means “ancient”.
We
often use it when we think something is
very
old. A rough guide in my art historian days
in
Britain, covering a wide-ranging areas
including
antique, was “any objects more
than
one hundred years old of monetary
and
aesthetic value”. So, I was writing about
anything
from the treasures of Assyria or
ancient China
to the Victorian monstrocity.
Whatever
it is, it is a concrete and specific
physical
thing which reminds us of the past.
Scientifically,
it is partof the concept of the
Newtonian
time, though its time never
gains
or loses but just passes incessantly
and
continually.
If
there are no gains or losses in the
Newtonian
time, ‘lost time’ is that
which
you and I would feel as if we have lost.
Therefore,
it is a far more complicated time
horizon,
involving not only the physical
time
but also emotional, personal,
psychological
and imaginary or imaginative
factors.
Why
do we keep things? Apart from
necessities
such as a bread knife or bedlinen,
we
keep them for their cultural or sentimental
values,
for possible monetary appreciation,
for
status symbol, or simply for satisfying our
greedy
andinsatiable possessiveness.
Some
people would increase their
possessions
in order to ease their
stresses
and anxieties. Others would
keep
some objects as a relic of
the
loved one they have lost either by death,
by
becoming a missing person, or by lost love.
Others,
presumablylike Cesar, would
wish
to regain knowledge, understanding
and
appreciation of a particular bygone
period(s)
of time, such as the Ukiyoe
floating
world of the Edo Japan, or the
Dickensian
England.
Whatever
lost time Cesar was searching
for,
his conduct or thought behind it is
symbolic
of all of us humans and therefore
is
universal and ‘timeless’. This cannot
be
anything other than a great haiku.
Many
congratulations!
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