Over the weekend, our class started to read Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. This novel is a collection of Albert Einsteins dreams from when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. Normally I would be excited to start reading a new book, however I have been continually disappointed with the mandatory literature presented in each English class over the years. For Einstein's Dreams this is not the case.
This book is amazing. I have only read 32 pages of it and already I am convinced that this is one of the greatest novels ever written.
This novel is centered around the ideas of time represented in each of Einstein's Dreams. In each dream something new and imaginative happens that keeps me wanting to read more. The stories are relateable, things and events that happen in every day life, and because of that, it's easier to pay attention to the content within the story and the concepts of time that the story (within the dream) follows.
Time is something that is all around us at all times, and it is not a subject that the average teenager (I believe) thinks about as deeply as this book does. Although we are constantly aware of time, we seem to be aware of only one kind of time, the end of time. Now I'm not saying the end of time as in the physical end of time or the end of the world but more as an idea.
For example, when a project is due, that date and time is the end of time for that specific project, or Friday is the end of time in school for that week, or the day of one of your finals is the end of preparing for that final and that information ends after the final has ended. Do you see what I'm getting at?
We wait for endings.
Our lives revolve around the idea of deadlines and 'the finish' and the end of anything in school really. We go through high school even just to get to the end of it. And then what? We wait for the end of college. When will we stop waiting for endings? When will we learn to live in a different time, a different world, where endings do not exist?
In that idea, Einstein was right in his first dream, how time is a circle that continually bends back and repeats itself over and over again. But why live by that one dream? Sometimes we don't have a choice. We teenagers have to live by that idea almost automatically when we enter the world. But it is our decision whether or not we will choose another idea, another dream, another world.
Another time.
Until next time,
Rachel.
Rachel, this is brilliant! I never thought about time as being an ending. You're so right, it's almost like we live for endings, but what about the beginnings? It's like we don't pay attention to those at all, but instead we wait until the end of something. It's actually kind of sad to think about it because it's so true. Honestly, this post made me really think about my own life and how it's so true, about almost everything.
ReplyDeleteRachel I love how you and I unconsciously vibe off of each other. It seems that in every blog one of us writes, the other has thought about the same things in similar ways. I have thought about how in middle school we were riding it out until graduation and high school the same way. Now that the end is near I am thinking about the next "end" instead of the much closer "beginning". And about the theory of time bending back on itself and forming a continuous circle, the fact that everything from history to fashion to behavior repeats itself continuously is proof that you and Einstein are right.
ReplyDelete