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A lady known as Paris, Romantic and Charming Has left her old companions and faded from view Lonely men with lonely eyes are seeking her in vain Her streets are where they were, but there's no sign of her She has left the Seine The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay, I heard the laughter of her heart in every street café The last time I saw Paris, her trees were dressed for spring, And lovers walked beneath those trees and birds found songs to sing. I dodged the same old taxicabs that I had dodged for years. The chorus of their squeaky horns was music to my ears. The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay, No matter how they change her, I'll remember her that way. I'll think of happy hours, and people who shared them Old women, selling flowers, in markets at dawn Children who applauded, Punch and Judy in the park And those who danced at night and kept our Paris bright 'til the town went dark. ↗
A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family. ↗
Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time. Hence, in narrative, the great difficulty of presenting a very complicated change which happens suddenly. If we do justice to the complexity, the time the reader must take over the passage will destroy the feeling of suddenness. If we get the suddenness we shall not be able to get in the complexity. I am not saying that genius will not find its own way of palliating this defect in the instrument; only that the instrument is in this way defective. ↗
Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot? ↗
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly. ↗
Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you. ↗
I never thought that this moment would come for me. My whole life has been shaped to protect me and keep my heart safe. I know that I’m about to change all of that and I should be terrified. I lean forward and brush my lips across his. The fact that the fear never comes and all I can think about is Connor and his mouth on mine gives me the courage to speak. “Connor, make love to me.” I say against his lips. ↗
I clutch to William’s hand. “I can do this.” He nods and pulls me tight into his arms. “I know you can. I believe in you.” I hug him tightly. I don’t want to lose this … I don’t want this to change anything; I still want to love this man when this is over. “Take care of the others.” He whispers in my ear. “I will.” He picks me up and kisses me, deeply and desperately, for a long time. When we finally release our lip lock, we’re both in tears. His voice is barely a whisper. “I love you, Alanna.” I stroke his cheek. “I love you.” It’s the first time we’ve both said it out loud at the same time. Something about that makes me feel very hopeful, despite the circumstances. ↗
We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. ↗
