he is holy; he is firm, pt. 3

Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisesome days?

Our days are illuminated by our senses, for it is through them that we are connected to all that we experience. We see, feel, hear, taste, and smell our universe, and are therefore tethered to the notion that this is what's real. But "by what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name?" And how does it know us, and why do we know that it does?

In The Writing Life Dillard briefly revisits this problem when she asks, “Why does death so take us by surprise?” The reality of being one day finished-- being "over"-- jolts us every time we look at it because there's something about us that simply expects to continue forever. We take immortality for granted, and are shocked every day to find out that it isn't granted. Even time's passage is enigmatic; we hardly even feel it. Of course, physics itself considers this arrow of time to be strange and perhaps illusory. In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene writes this:

All the physical laws that we hold dear fully support what is known as time-reversal symmetry. This is the statement that if some sequence of events can unfold in one temporal order [...] then these events can also unfold in reverse. [...] Not only do known laws fail to tell us why we see events unfold in only one order, they also tell us that, in theory, events can unfold in reverse order (p. 145).

This passage isn't exactly referring to time travel, but in such a universe--this universe--the uncharring of Julie's face should be a definite possibility.

Still, what is this thing we call time and what are these its constraints? We feel we should be able to splash about in it as we do in space. Of course, space does have its own problems and it is spacetime itself that distracts us from what we intuitively feel to be real.

My niece at four inquired, awed, if I knew that everybody was going to die.