On the Transitory Nature of...Us

I watched a great movie tonight, called Before Sunrise, that was about two young people who met on a train in a foreign country and spent one night together, both knowing they might not ever see each other again. Incidentally, they were a French girl and an American guy, but that wasn't the point of the story, at least not to me. Instead what struck me most was the movie as a study of the transitory experience - the temporariness of feelings, of meaning, of significance of time and place. In the final moments of the movie, still shots of the places that the couple had spent parts of their one and only night together - this night so significant to each of them by its very brevity and rarity - shown the following morning in daylight... my words can't describe the way those same places, which had once held so much meaning for two certain people, could just hours later be just another park bench, just another patch of grass, just another café table. The way an old lady could wobble unknowingly and unaffected over the same patch of grass where these two young people had forged such a connection, when that patch of grass that would forever hold so much significance to that couple, whenever conjured up in memory would trigger other memories, if ever revisited would impart so much feeling. But of course the old lady would wobble unknowingly and unaffected over that patch of grass, for how could she have known what had happened at just that precise location just a few hours ago? And yet that very transitory, ephemeral nature of the moment, that is where lies the amazingness and the scariness of....well, i don't know what. love? romance? emotion? any shared experience? any personal experience? My point is that I was incredibly moved by the idea that a moment, an experience, an encounter, that could hold so much significance to a person, say me, would be after all, just that. A moment, an experience, an encounter. A matter of a few minutes, perhaps a few hours, even a few days or weeks. But once it is over, that's it. It has passed and it is no longer. And once its gone, and you have gotten up from that patch of grass, and an old lady has wobbled over it with no idea that you and/or anybody else had sat there and experienced something so important - once that moment has passed, there is no physical trace of your presence there at all. No evidence of the time you spent there, the words you said, the emotions you felt. For all anyone could ever know, the moment may not have passed at all. The experience may never have existed. It may never have happened, and there is no proof at all. Except in your memory and perhaps someone else's.

But we are all lucky to have this jumble of cells that produces memory, for what if that someone else's memory were to fail them, or worse yet, your memory to fail you? Or is that really worse? Would it be worse to have them forget and you remember, and yet be unable to prove that it happened, because only you could remember? Or would it be a good thing that at least you remembered, so that at least you could hold on to that happy significant moment forever (or for as long as your memory would permit you)? Or if that memory were skewed (as I'm reading in Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness) and the way you remembered what happened didn't align with what the other person remembered, or with what actually happened at all? On that note, how much of what humankind remembers of the world experience is accurate at all, if we all perceive things a little differently, a little uniquely, a little crooked? Does crooked a billion times over make the overall understanding of the universe generally straight?

As you can see, if you've been able to follow my crazed train of thought at all, I'm very much intrigued with this impermanent, temporal, fleeting idea of experiences, and when I think a little too much about it late at night, this strange idea snowballs into bigger and bigger questions of memory and perception and existence, and then I start using huge fluffy quasi-philosophical words like "universe" and "humankind" ...

Anyways, I've returned home from France and I apologize for my lack of posts for the past couple of weeks. For lack of anything interesting to say, I just did not feel compelled to waste precious (ha) internet realty with humdrum recounting of my humdrum life. For a small update though, my family has been incredibly occupied with packing up our entire house in preparation for sale, because once again, we are moving. This time to where, we have no idea, which is a change, but the act itself of packing up, discarding the unnecessary, keeping only the useful and/or treasured, is one my family is quite familiar with. This sort of event would be likely to prompt some feelings of nostalgia, intro- or retro-spection perhaps, but my busy hands have kept my head empty for the most part, until recently, as things have wound down and the boxes have begun to pile up, stalling traffic outside but not inside my head. And tonight's movie it seems has been the ignition for my thoughts once again...but until I have some time to sift through these swirling thoughts in my head, I will leave you. I hope whoever, wherever you are, you are enjoying the summertime air and the chance to have some thoughts yourselves. I promise the next time I write, I will be able to better explain myself and what I have been thinking, and seeing, and perhaps have something a bit more interesting to say, but until then, salut and happy almost-August.

P.S. If you're interested in reading more about this movie that stirred my thoughts, and its recent sequel, I recommend: http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/01/before-sunrise-and-before-sunset-laden-with-happiness-and-tears/