But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that time can be visualized and understood in a different, more tangible way, rather than as a linear concept.
Margaret Atwood's quote presents a unique perspective on time, encouraging us to think of it not merely as a sequence of moments but as a layered, visual experience. This notion implies that time is complex and multifaceted, resembling overlapping transparencies, each representing different experiences or memories. By conceptualizing time in this way, we can gain deeper insights into how our past, present, and future interconnect.
In practice
In a discussion about how memories shape our present, you might quote Atwood to illustrate the complexity of time.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.
Intolerance is a species of violence and therefore against our creed.
They believe themselves Lucifer's equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him... to him we no longer speak.
Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play.
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
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