Linearity

[rinue]

When I find a journal I like, I tend to go back and read old entries. This means that, yes, if you're on my friends list, I have read every entry you've ever written. Depending on how new the journal was when I discovered it, this may have meant months or even years of backentries.

This is nothing like reading a collection of essays. It is full of gaps and redundancies analogous to rests and leitmotifs in a piece of Romantic music - or maybe I only say that because I'm a musician. Regardless, it is pretty certain that I'm not meant to approach the medium in this way. You made these entries to be read at the time they were written. I am not supposed to run through your life from March to December, skipping past a given month in less than an hour.

I am not the audience you were writing for. Do you know how erratic you look to me? Do you know how forcefully I have to remind myself that your opinion changed not in a moment, but in a month? Although I'm looking at a calendar, January seems impossibly far away; I am surprised by media references I think of as recent. Since it is now March, I can't exist in January - but there you are, and it is the first time I've met you.

Is this how a human life looks to an extra-dimensional being? Is progress diminished when you know the future, and the answers to old speculations are obvious? I wonder whether life has more value while you're living it, or long afterward, when it can be properly sorted.

Perhaps it would be fairer to set our journals side by side, so they may hold hands as we travel through time.

Comments

[hipgunslinger.livejournal.com]

I do the same with the backreading.
I find the transitive nature fascinatingly similar to the idea that just about every four years all the cells in our body are entirely different. The organism is recognizeably the same, but the fact remains that the components are different.