“Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.”
― Greg Iles, The Quiet Game
Natchez, MS photo is licensed under CC By 4.0 — linked to dallas.todaysmama.com
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Deborah, I really enjoyed this piece. So true and to Jimmy’s comment…..AMEN
we’re all “doing time”… here on “the rock”… each of us serving his or her life sentence… without the possibility of parole. try to make good use of the time. try to love one another… it’s the only thing that makes prison life bearable.
Nice Jimmy!