from the paisley notebook

where does time come from?

Within the past 24 hours, a young man asked me, "Where does time come from?" I remember he asked in a genuinely naive, quizzical, slightly wry tone. I remember replying, "Time to the Greeks was Saturn eating his children." I remember him smiling Oh Yea, nodding, and maybe words to the effect of I should have known.

But that's all I remember.

That I remember it all has to do with the fact that I also remember noticing how his question had seemed apt to the context of my writing about time (and history — and my not remembering it, now, apt to my writing about amnesia).

I don't remember who I was speaking with or where we were (although I seem to remember a Chinese restaurant menu). The context utterly escapes me. I could swear it happened in real life, but it could just as well have happened in a dream. Maybe it was at the check-out stand.

Now that I think about it, and process it through words, I think it was the manager of the grocery store, at the check-out aisle.

Yet I still prefer the event being disembodied, without location. Like a consciousness without a body ...