Sunday, October 12, 2008
Fourth Dimension
As humans we can only handle so many stimulants at a time. Our Brains capabilities, though highly evolved, are limited to so many neurons firing at once. In the story, there is talk of the theory on nothing ever really dying. Time is a measurement that humans have used for centuries. the sun dial gave meaning to calender days. I often ponder the idea of time and how it is merely the limit to what we are able to handle. In the Bible it states that on this certain day God created Sun and Moon, i beleive it was the third day....forgive me if i am incorrect, its been a while since i read scripture. if they were not created unitl the third day, and man used these as tools to devise a calender and clocks, what were the measures of the first 2 "days" in Gods realm. Is time just a means for humans to believe that we are moving forward in time? to keep us sane? Billy's ability to move within his timeline in such a fashion is beyond what we are seemingly capable to comprehend. Our conditioning is to think that we begin, progress forward with no prior knowledge of future and then we end.
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2 comments:
Good question. Yes, I think time was devised to give humans a sense of identity. We lack the capacity to comprehend something as ambiguous as "eternal." The book is about seeing in the fourth dimension. Billy can understand the transition of death (if he's not crazy). Everything we witness as humans has a beginning and an end, so for us to imagine something different would be impossible. I like to think of it in a broader spectrum. Take for example colors. There are hundreds of colors that we see every day. But, would be so difficult to imagine a color we have never seen before?
I believe time is means to keep us sane in that if we were able to see into the future, like the tralfamadorians, and we could not stop events from happening, even bad events, we would probably have a difficult time living with the guilt of not preventing the bad event from happening. An example from the book is when the tralfamadorian guide tells Billy that every moment in time is structured a certain way,and that it cannot be altered.
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