The Rebellion of the Dead

May 19, 2008

On page 30 of crimethINC.’s latest book, Days of War, Nights of Love:

There is no more commonplace observation than this, but to my knowledge no one has yet set out to study why children and adults experience the passing of time differently.

I’ve thought about that problem before, and the answer to me seems straightforward. As a young child, a single summer vacation represents mathematically a significant portion of your life; a year, even moreso. As we accumulate experience in life, each interval is a lesser part of the whole experience, thus far. To a five year old, who might have 2 or 3 years or real memory, a single summer is immense. To a twenty-eight year old, with twenty-five or twenty-six years of memory, a single summer borders the inconsequential.

But I like the passage so far:

What if he had known he was going to die, what then? Would he have counted backwards from that day, lived differently? Would he have frozen up in the face of that terrible knowledge?

What if I could know in advance when my own death would come? It was waiting ahead of me, as sure as Daniel’s had been, as sure as all of ours are. If someone could look at time from above, taking in the sweep of history all at once, we would all appear as the walking dead, moving obliviously along our preordained tracs towards inexorable ends.

crimethINC. literature (to my limited exposure) is filled with provocative prose, anthemic anti-propaganda.  I’ll give the rest of this one a read over the next few days.  (h/t: William Gillis)


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Francois Tremblay May 19, 2008 1:27 pm

    That’s a horrible passage. I can’t believe you like it. Instead of showing how even fatalism cannot fade the vitality of the human spirit, they just give into it. If I knew the day of my death, I wouldn’t try to give into the fatalistic mindset.

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