The Rabbits of Time

(or, possibly, it's "heirs")

I have started listening to "Remembrance of Things Past" as I recalled Proust has a unique and immediately thrilling relationship to time. To him, it seems an infinite resource into which he can fully disappear, like merlin living backward, or the character in inception who protects himself in the middle of a dream. One feels as if when he died he must have done so almost by choice because, had he wished he could have disappeared in a dream within a dream, within a dream. While time, passing in ever more infinitesimal increments, beats, thwarted, at the windows without.
Leaving out the narrative dramatization: it is immediately clear that a philosophy of time, and human consciousness interaction with it, is present, and that it is a strong opposite to the idea expressed at the beginning of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" about the impossible fragility and uniqueness of everything. Well, here we have a concerted effort to use our ability to strengthen the fraying rope of experience.

During my initial stay in the hospital, I would play this game, in which I would carefully and methodically remember something, tasting the memory carefully. And then rhetorically ask myself "are there any more?" (memories).
I had started memory mining like this less intensely and seriously, before my stroke, (possibly inspired by reading Proust the first time) when I had made the striking discovery that my memories contained a host of residual sensations, unprocessed or under processed, not just physical sensations but mental states and emotions. I went back to a time when, if I hadn't been too busy with the rush of life, I felt that I should have been able to experienced happiness and leisure. I was the lead Humanities teacher and coordinator for a summer school, and I was given the ability to hire my own staff, and one of my good friends was the art teacher. I remember many times, finishing work and going together to have German beer and watch the Giants play baseball, as we decompressed and talked. No one was hanging over me, I had autonomy, and was making my own life, it should have been a happy and care free time, but instead we were distracted, or I was by the stress and mundanity of the present as it rushed up to us.

Some years later, prior to the stroke, I went back and looked at those memories in nostalgia, but also disappointment and was startled to find contentment radiating out of them. I went back, melancholicly looking for the "langeor of youth", that Evelyn Waugh talks about and I found it there, alive. What was striking to me, is that I was convinced these impressions were proper to the time they had occurred in, and weren't added retrospectively, why I was convinced I'm not sure, but I was.
In this way I discovered you could mine your memories for a second chance at the feeling of time rushing by. It owed something to the memory mining Harry Potter does in "The Half-Blood Prince”. It always felt somehow illegal, and like something to be done clandestinely, because of our tyrannical clarity about our being able to experience time only once before it passes.

As you may know, rabbits chew their own pellets. As repugnant as the practice is to us, because of the way we process food, their fast digestions process it so partially that the material retains much of its nutritional value, even structure, and it makes a great deal of sense. Perhaps we should feel differently about having multiple interactions with the same "piece" of time if we thought of it more in terms of an interaction with a substance, rather than a single, ongoing, spiritual (pardon the phrase) event. Here is our most precious resource by common agreement, we suck at processing it, we know it, and yet for some reason, we only allow ourselves one shot at processing it which "counts". Of course it doesn't help that many of our techniques for multiplying out our experiences tend to impoverish the initial one, but that is, A: a discussion for a different day and B: maybe the fact that we do such practices so insistently, here think of taking cell phone pictures of everything, should be understood in terms of our deep need to more fully process it and less in terms of radical inadequacy as beings, we love to blame the processing, perhaps because our ideas about the singularity of time are so fixed. Anyway, I say be a good rabbit; run to be sure, but also chew!

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