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0397ae4
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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Alan Lightman |
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ee2d589
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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tragedy
sadness
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Alan Lightman |
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84a4a00
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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
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tragedy
loneliness
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Alan Lightman |
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ae52b0b
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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tragedy
human-nature
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Alan Lightman |
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42cf634
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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Alan Lightman |
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95f56bd
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For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
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Alan Lightman |
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e662d7f
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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Alan Lightman |
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4cbffef
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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Alan Lightman |
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eb52a58
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Unconditional love. That's what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn't he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evapo..
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selfishness
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Alan Lightman |
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91e9db4
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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Alan Lightman |
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ee9ad00
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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Alan Lightman |
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ba48d19
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time,..
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Alan Lightman |
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a2e07af
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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Alan Lightman |
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2ca0a3f
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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Alan Lightman |
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f274e1a
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And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice, will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone el..
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kissing
time
lovers
love
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Alan Lightman |
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9dd5e24
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time." "They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires." "Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on t..
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Alan Lightman |
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23a84fc
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Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you. Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration -- an idea that would unde..
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Alan Lightman |
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b2e6a0f
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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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time
past
einstein-s-dreams
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Alan Lightman |
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0460a65
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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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Alan Lightman |
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6eb7e65
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the mo..
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Alan Lightman |
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6b65de8
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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
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Alan Lightman |
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8cbee40
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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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commitment
uncertainty-principle
uncertainty
chance
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Alan Lightman |
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d173805
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...But this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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gratitude
privilege
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Alan Lightman |
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cab7f7a
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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Alan Lightman |
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c309c40
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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time
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Alan Lightman |
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0207569
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Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant...
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reality
past
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Alan Lightman |
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5dc48ce
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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Alan Lightman |
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be866d4
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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Alan Lightman |
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d53eb5f
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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Alan Lightman |
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486d84c
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Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, and sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past effect in the future, but future and past are intertwined.
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Alan Lightman |
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cb57044
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In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged.
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Alan Lightman |
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50b6a71
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If time and the passage of events are the same, then time moves barely at all. If time and events are not the same, then it is only people who barely move. If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Alan Lightman |
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2f2d4a4
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In fact, this is a world without future. In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind. In this world, no person can imagine the future. Imagining the future is no more possible than seeing colors beyond violet: the senses cannot conceive what may lie past the visible end of the spectrum. In a world without future, each parting of friends is death. In a world without future, each loneliness is..
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Alan Lightman |
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e60ea01
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I don't know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature ..
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Alan Lightman |
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c3b44fc
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And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.
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Alan Lightman |
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d560208
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Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life. It was almost as if a secret had passed between them. Was this some kind of love? I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness. I wanted to whisper to them: 'This is it. This is it'"."
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universe
religion
science-fiction
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Alan Lightman |
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f1527e2
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Well-being and need are purely relative concepts. There is no such thing as poverty in itself, suffering in itself, unhappiness in itself. All is relative.
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Alan Lightman |
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aa01109
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Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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Alan Lightman |
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acc2024
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Some few people are born without any sense of time. As consequence, their sense of place becomes heightened to excruciating degree. They lie in tall green grass are questioned by poets and painters from all over the world. These time-deaf are beseeched to describe the precise placement of trees in the spring, the shape of snow on the Alps, the angle of sun on a church, the position of rivers, the location of moss, the pattern of birds in a ..
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Alan Lightman |
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e392884
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Suppose that time is not a quantity but a quality, like the luminescence of the night above the trees just when a rising moon has touched the treeline. Time exists, but it cannot be measured.
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Alan Lightman |
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9be0268
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In a world where time cannot be measured, there are no clocks, no calendars, no definite appointments. Events are triggered by other events, not by time.
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Alan Lightman |
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c0cac18
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On occasion a traveler will venture from one city to another. Is he perplexed What took seconds in Berne might take hours in Fribourg or days in Lucerne. In the time for a leaf to fall in one place a flower could bloom in another. In the duration of a thunderclap in one place two people could fall in love in another. In the time that a boy grows into a man a drop of rain might slide down a windowpane yet the traveler is unaware of these dis..
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Alan Lightman |
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7eb4a3b
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It [the mind] can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven." In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And un..
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Alan Lightman |
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e98fa67
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He feels himself falling. He wants to spend every minute with her, he wants to possess her, her purity, her body, her mind. She is what he has been waiting for. Now he can live.
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Alan Lightman |