Feb 13 2005
The World Has Turned And Left Me Here
I wish modern science would invent a drug that causes time to feel much longer, the way it felt when you were a child. What a great drug. A year would feel like a year, not ten minutes. Your adulthood would feel long and full instead of like some out of control carnival ride. Who would want a drug like this? Older people, I guess - people whose sense of passing time has hit the acceleration pedal.
And I guess they ought to also invent a drug capable of the opposite effect. Again, there'd be no immediate sensation, but after a year of the drug, you'd say, Wow! Has it been a year already? It feels like yesterday. Who'd take this drug? Me, when I'm lonely. And prisoners with life sentences.
Here's a third notion: what if you had to choose just one of these drugs. And what if taking one would instantly and forever cancel out any effect you might get from the other? I imagine most of us, myself included, would take the one that makes life feel longer. Which means that a lonely life is better than no life at all.
I guess alcohol is the closest thing we have to a drug that makes time fly. Cocaine, perhaps? I wouldn't know about that. Maybe that's why I'm so mistrustful of booze. It makes time fly in the short term, and in the long term it obliterates memory - which is, of course, a way of erasing time.
- Written by Douglas Coupland, taken from his book Eleanor Rigby.
Posted by Kyle in Permalink
Comments
Can't wait to read it. I bought it a few weeks ago, and it's next in my reading queue.
Posted by: Lalitree at February 13, 2005 11:45 AM
i now know what book i want to read next.
thanks for posting this excerpt kyle.
Posted by: melina at February 14, 2005 2:51 AM
