Can't Stop Time

Abstract

If you keep quiet and still, you may start to hear the seconds of your life ticking away—or so it may seem. We measure time by the oscillations of magical quartz crystals and by an atomic clock, both of which keep our timepieces more precise than we need them to be. We also measure time by the events that mark our lives and scar our bodies. Forty years seems like a broad expanse under any circumstances, but for me it seems even more so when I consider events. I remember my deranged high school classmate, an anarchist who made a mistake while making a bomb and destroyed himself and a building that was an underground bomb factory in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s. I compare him with the current students of my old high school, who on 9/11 ran in terror from the collapsing World Trade Center. Not only were my classmates and those students on 9/11 living in different times, they seem to have been living in different universes. When I hear many children of the Age of Aquarius, the “peace generation,” now beating war drums, I cannot help but feel as though my world has entirely disappeared. Of course, I am engaging in the self-indulgent excess that …