Time Travelling, Thoughts, and Literature

Each second is another time travelling experience either to the future or to the past; seldom to the present, for the present was a second away. In this way, every person on earth is able of breaking the temporal and spatial constraints of the body, and move beyond the bodily experience of the now. Thoughts as a form of unwritten language, or as images of an internal condensation of language, are the spaceships of each one's time travelling experience. As my body sits at this moment on a chair writing this piece, my mind is always a step ahead thinking about the future- what do I write from now? As I open up a pomegranate and delight in its beauty, my mind instantly thinks of metaphors for what my eyes see. As you are reading this right now, you are occupying at the same time another spatial and temporal dimension granted to you by your thoughts. By the time you have finished with that sentence, your mind jumps, without hesitation or consent, unto a (slightly or vastly) different mental place. Therefore, thoughts, which are the offspring of language, can and do carry the consciousness of each individual bodily- container outside of the present. Present, could just as well be an illusion. it is a fleeting concept, it always changes and it can't be materialized. The thought of 7:01 has changed the present of 7:02; you could be living in the past right now. Watching the sunflowers trying to suck the sun, someone thinks of that time, a while ago, when some other sunflowers were lying on a pastel field.

Literature then, which is given in words, expands the possibilities of time travelling for each individual. It is a way of contemplating time. The content of the book is a place of time encapsulated and manipulated; the past (the process of writing the book) is present now, at the time of reading it. There's an exchange of tenses, between writer and reader and the former is the carrier of time. The writer amalgamates with narration and grammar the experience of time of the reader. The writer is a magician, a creator of another space and time reality. The writer's words structure the reader's thoughts at a specific point in time; and that point can expand and stay for a lifetime. A phrase of the past, read somewhere, sometime in the past, can be relived now, tomorrow, yesterday.

The book itself is a an object of transforming time. For example, the reader reads a sentence- '' 'Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,' said Mrs Ramsay '' -and instantaneously travels into time, makes correlations with the past and the future, in terms of the circumstance of the literary piece and the condition's of the reader's life. Who is Mrs. Ramsey, What day is it tomorrow? Who is she talking to? What time do I have that dentist appointment tomorrow?, and so forth. Therefore, the very act of reading becomes entrapped in this perpetual process of time travelling. Henceforth, literature which is the art of words, and words are the vessels of time, is another spaceship for us to experience the 'multispatiality' of time.

P.S: In case you are stuck in time, the italicized extract is from Virginia Woolf's novella To the Lighthouse, page one.

* Painting :Unknown title by Anna and Elena Balbusso