Waiting

From Ian McEwan's Atonement:

"Through the material of his coat he felt the bundle for her letters. I'll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn't touch him now. It was clear enough -- one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. He felt it pressing down, heavy as a greatcoat."

McEwan's novel explores the difference between continually producing one another in our shared narratives and experiencing radically different narratives. Waiting falls under the latter. Narratives, for McEwan, are what bind us to one another and drive us apart. To atone is to be "at-one."

Towards a Gayer Science

From Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime:

"Meaning, for its part, is always unhappy. Analysis is, by definition, unhappy, since it is born of critical disillusionment. But language, for its part, is happy, even when referring to a world without illusion and without hope. That might even be the definition of a radical thinking: a happy form and an intelligence without hope."

Chicane's "No Ordinary Morning"

When I discovered the video (after having been familiar with the song), I was struck by this particular interpretation of the lyrics.

A man leaves a woman. A woman chases a second man through a parking garage with her BMW. He escapes narrowly. At the top of the garage, the sun has set and the woman gets out of a car, approaching the first man who left her. He is now holding a bottle of champagne. The man and woman embrace and share a moment of intimacy. She throws the bottle of champagne over the edge, which dissolves into nothing upon hitting the concrete. And then she pushes him from the parking structure. He grabs her arm and she falls with him.



But what is striking is the ending, after the "cut." Both the first man and the woman land on a air pillow. She is congratulated by her crew. The first man walks to a set trailer and glares at her intensely, as if in the "real" world he is the one in her position.

From Mann's Magic Mountain

"Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded the powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness, giving us back our primitive, unattached state."

Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

1979 Penny

That fateful image towards the end of Jeannot Szwarc's Somewhere in Time (1980), when Richard Collier (played by Christopher Reeve) pulls out the 1979 penny from his pocket, and is transported irreversibly back to his own time, leaving his love Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) in 1912.



What if one were to think of this time-travel romance as a metaphor? Across space or across ideology. The irreversible, insurmountable gaps that separate us, making no distinction between ideal and material existence.

Is heaven to come or is heaven that which is reflected back upon?

The eternal beckoning, "come back to me..."