We consider the flow of time to be infinite – filling a void that runs its course with every generation, every birth, and every death. The physical aspect of time is body seen through the years, growing in size, dexterity, speed, and strength. The readiness of time is anything but ambiguous. However, the flow of time is what humans have harnessed and tried to manipulate, through any medium, to remain obtainable in a sense that answers to our questions. Or in a sense, the way time flows forward is the only answer to our only question: How well do we live?
After watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – a film which represents an unusually obvious paradigm of aging and time – a movie which creates a spectrum of the world’s most dreadful trio that is loving an age that exists as a defense against time – forced me to think about perspective.
Perspective as we need it. Perspective as it actually is. Imagine a bird flapping its wings over and over again, wafting in mid-air; not moving in any direction; still yet so topsy-turvy are its movements as if it’s invisibly glued to its place with nowhere to go. A perspective that defies the movement of time in space, but adopts the space as its movement until time catches up with it. Isn’t time but a glass through which we glorify our perspective until it builds itself into an entire millennium? Narrow intervals that mark our thoughts, actions, and beliefs until we move on to another entirely different or inconsequential interval.
If you were to pin down these intervals of time, it would be a room full of stacked boxes; some too big in size, while some too small and almost invisible among the crowd. Some unemptied while some that look like they’ve been destroyed and yet its charred remains still remain scattered on the floor.
Or they’re drawers like the ones we have in offices to store documents. Small drawers, rusted with age, stacked on top and next to each other. Our time determines how deep and long each drawer is; each drawer manifests a different scent of a different time.
At the end of it all, you glimpse into a few boxes or pull out drawers, but the rest remain dormant, almost futile to time. Is that how you perceive time? What happens when you reverse it from finish to start? Then, what will the room in which time marks everything down, so perfectly and so vehemently, look like?
Perspective holds time in its palms. Or is it the other way around? I guess the answer exists beyond what words can explain. Just one of those things we can experience, if in tiny fragments in movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.