Time is beautiful

The last thing you will hear somebody say, perhaps, is that time is beautiful.

But it is.  Really.

We talk of the ravages of time. Its mastery over civilisations and dicators.  Shelley’s Ozymandias pictures it.  And even if it heals wounds, we know that it will also wound all heels.  Who looks forward to the slow decay of their mind and body?

Consider: a lazy Sunday afternoon where time seems to take twice as long.  Smelling the roses.  The stitch in time that saves nine.  Everything is beautiful in its time.

Perhaps we cannot appreciate time because we do not love it.  We do not like its testimony of our limits.  It tells us we age, that we cannot be in more than one place at one time, that we need to plan, that we need to remember, that we also need to be spontaneous, and that we also need to forget.  It tells us that our parents are important, and that so are our children, that it is a difficult gift that we can give to others, but one that we happily receive.

Today, we are time “poor”.  We want to skip time.  To jump the queue and get straight to the action.  None of this time-wasting waiting for things to happen.  The frustration of sluggish morning traffic, the torpidity of a loading computer.  The lethargy that making a phone call, or writing a letter induces, when an sms or an email will do.  Twitter.  We do not love time, and so we cannot know that it is beautiful.  And if you do not know that it is beautiful, how can you give it to another?

Filed under: random thoughts , convenience culture, taking time out, time, time poor

Communism: The Game

I’ve just finished reading through The Communist Manifesto.  It’s a reading for a unit I’m teaching this semester.  It reminds me of the West Wing, with Toby and Sam discussing Mao’s phrase “permanent revolution”.   Toby says something to the effect of ‘you think the Communists never wrote a pretty sentence?  How did they get all those followers?’  Umberto Eco reckons that all advertisers should read the Manifesto, and surely, he’s right  – gripping stuff!

In my turn, I reckon game programmers should read it.  It makes a fantastic plot for a real time strategy game:  Oppress the working classes,  develop world markets, unit the workers, seize control of the means of production… what an awesome game it would make!  That’s where lefties should be investing.  Computer games.

Who knows – imagine if all the IT workers managed to get together and switch all the switches off?

Filed under: random thoughts , Communism, Communist Manifesto, Computer Gaming, Engels, Marx

Wordlove

Words that I love: Words that are lego-bricked together into one big train of a word, expressing a complex sentiment.  Heretofore, nevertheless, whereupon, oftentimes.

Filed under: random thoughts , wordlove