Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

Okay, this is a long overdue blogpost, but I've got Things To Do, so I hope you'll excuse me if I hurry it up. I promised myself I'd write this while bunking in with my cousin in Bombay; he's now in London, his daughter (my niece!) is all growned up, and the relationships I was thinking about then fail to signify (or, you know, signify especially hard right now, depending). But if there's one thing I've got going for me these days, it's that I've managed to keep Things To Do coming up through the cracks. I'm going to spend a large chunk of today hanging out with some cool people and watching a supposedly-good movie (although what I really want to watch is something else altogether - such guiltiness!), and there ain't no universe in which that's a bad thing, period. I will refuse to argue this point.

So: concepts of forever. I love words which seem to tease at themselves, and forever's one of them, I think (another one? The rapist/therapist. Always makes me giggle). Forever really means "for ever", implying a stretch of uncountable centuries, rather than an impossible point of time in the dim reaches of tomorrow. A girl I cared very much about a long time ago pointed out something else: in human time spans, forever doesn't signify. Creatures living for a half-dozen decades can hardly hope to hold in their little monkey brains the idea of time stretching out forever (or for ever) in all directions. Instead, she postulated, "forever is as far into the future as we can't see beyond" (paraphrasing, of course, and my sincerely apologies if I've messed it up).

There is something else - the Bubble, which I will not spend time explaining and describing in any great detail. But imagine if you "bubble off" a bit of time: time proceeds linearly, then something happens and the bottom falls out of the universe: you're suddenly in negative time, hanging free off the string of time. The impossible happens frequently, life seems charmed, happiness is pure and infectious and there's no problem which can't be solved by love. Then, with the impossible whoosh of enforced acceleration associated with such things, time slowly starts up again and returns to its normal speed. Life returns to well-known haunts and paths, love is no longer supreme, and the universe can slowly return to its usual clichés - loneliness, unhappiness, pointlessness, and all the dreary machinations of life.

Contemplate that a minute. One of the tricks of being inside that Bubble is that, unsustainable and transient though it may seem, it does feel like it goes on forever - and if you can't really see the end until you break out through the Bubble's fragile skin, then wouldn't you say it goes on forever? And, atleast for me, I didn't really believe it was going to end - it's like watching stars in the sky; you know that you are looking into the distant past of these entities you admire, but you don't really accept it. Interstellar distances, as a very intelligent man once put it, simply won't fit into human understanding.

I'm supposed to contemplate The Bridge Across Forever as well, which I have mixed ideas about (liked the first half, got turned off in the second half and so never finished it).

I'm blogging about this because I found a little note in an old book of mine to write about this from years and years ago, so I must comply. Twitter's also broken for me, which is why I must relearn (temporarily, I hope) to express myself in chunks of more than a hundred and forty characters.

Thus ends a ramble; when will there be another?

Labels: for ever, forever, love, relationships, the Bubble

This post was posted by Unknown at 11:07 am