Indeed:
I don’t like that. I never have.
I recall, many years ago, as a young journalist,
I was dating a very attractive red-headed social worker who I had met while
covering the Juvenile Court. She was a joy to be with. One night we drove down
to Perkins Beach, a lovely, fairly private place to park to look at the stars,
or whatever.
After philosophizing about the beauty
of the brightly lit downtown skyline, I put my arm around her and moved close, as
though to kiss. She pulled away. “Too soon”,
she whispered through her warm, perhaps passionate breath.
“Finite anxiety” was the problem, she
said almost clinically, concerning my move to caress her. Too frantic. Too focused on time, advised this
lovely young Baptist who declared that she believed in reincarnation. For her,
time was a friend. For me it was the enemy.
Needless to say that relationship, with its excellent potential, never
went anywhere.
Time had taken its toll.
I have often wanted to stop the movement
of time. To make it stand still to force
it backwards. To dispose of it entirely.
Now that I have moved well into my
golden years this intense pursuit of the runaway clock has become much more
than an intellectual enterprise.
I have tried to convince myself that time
itself does not actually exist except as the concoction of some Middle Ages scientists
who were trying to calculate the movement of the sun around the earth and,
after Galileo, the earth around the sun.
But, as the age of reason progressed, time
became almost pervasive. The master, rather than the servant. There was the
March of Time weekly feature at the movies, Time Magazine, and of course, Timex
watches which “keep on ticking when they take a licking,”
