Iain Pears Quote

Aunt Gertie could not tell the difference between 1928 and now. Uncle Joseph was dead and alive. In other words, she grasped the essential non-existence of time. Generally speaking, our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial order so they can be dealt with one at a time, rather than all at once as they should be. Such a way of interpreting existence is learnt, rather in the way that our brain has to turn the images which hit our retinas upside down in order to make sense of them. Children have little sense of time; nor do the very old. They live in an ever-present now, which stretches into the past and off into the future. Effect triggers cause, and both happen at the same moment, be that yesterday or tomorrow. Aunt Gertie sensed this because all the acquired mental discipline of the years was falling away from her. Once you realised this, her conversation was perfectly comprehensible, even if it did make me a little dizzy.