Broken mirrors, broken minds

Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye begins:

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.

…

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

And it ends with my favourite last lines (which also made American Book Review’s list)  from any novel:

Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of year ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the mist of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it.

But it's enough to see by.

When I was eight or nine, I loved photos. Not photos of siblings or friends or people I knew: photos of others. But only of the past. My parents had albums full of photos of people from a distant time, photos from the 60s, photos of weddings in the 70s with groomsmen in powder-blue suits and ruffled shirts. My dad had been an amateur photographer, and he had photos mounted on slides. This was at a time before digital photography destroyed all value in the craft. We had a miniature slide projector – it didn’t project anything larger than A4 size, but I loved those slides of women and men, mostly from the 60s, in front of water fountains and parks and buildings. I thought about the children in the pictures, children who by then would have been adults. Adulthood was inconceivable. 20 was inconceivable.

I don’t know that I was happier when I was nine, but I was certainly not nearly as large, I still wore normal size clothes and my limbs were not yet proportioned like those of a giant.

Today was my last day at placement. There was a somewhat awkward farewell afternoon tea at which we discussed the lottery winners and Bernie Madoff. I had my final placement review: it seems my report writing skills haven’t yet reached professional standard.

At some point in the past few years, my writing skills must have significantly deteriorated. All my essays used to be high distinctions, but now I find it painful to think of words, to put them together, to edit, to structure, to form cogent arguments. Maybe it’s just cognitive laziness. Probably it is. Thinking is hard. I much prefer perfecting cutting ad hominem vituperative aimed at cultural conservatives. They’re such an easy target. “Incoherent” is a fantastic word.

Tomorrow I’m staying in bed till noon watching Frasier.

When you took your pig-ugly dog for a walk this morning, and you had a leash neatly folded in your hand and said dog was free to molest me, what was that about? Was the leash just meant to be a visible reminder of your defiance of NSW law?
 

Not as grave as previous occasions.

Two to go.

Astride his rearing horse, Alexander the Great will soon raise his hand high above the main square in Macedonia's capital on a giant statue that has enraged Greece.

Todorovic earlier suggested the project was motivated by the deadlock in talks with Greece to resolve the dispute over the name of the former Yugoslav republic.

"When such negotiations last for about two years without any concessions from the Greek side, then perhaps this government decision to build a monument that angers them ... is a wise gesture," he said in a TV interview.

Athens has refused to recognise its neighbour under its constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia, because that is also the name of a northern Greek province.

UN-led negotiations on the 18-year-old row have proved fruitless, with Athens vetoing Macedonian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and threatening to derail its European Union integration.