Friday, September 25, 2009

A note from the future

My dear friend Adelaine wrote a post on her blog that nourished my parched imagination and set in motion a mental exercise in nostalgia.

Here's the big idea: If I could go back in time (and space) to slip myself a note from the future, what would I tell myself?

What does someone like me has to say to "himself minus 10 or 20 years", having lived a wonderful life many out there can't even remotely hope to have? What rues or regrets could I possibly have in my life that warrant a rewrite of my story at large?

If I ever get a chance to thwart time and space (I'm pretty sure I've just offended Einstein mid-sentence), I don't think I ever want to give the minutest detail of the future away to me in the past. Contrary to what I first thought it would do, doing so would not give me an upper hand in life—whatever I thought was important enough to justify a second attempt (which, as a good Sci-Fi flick would have it, was to happen at the exact anchor point in spacetime when and where "it" first presented itself).

Part of a well lived life consist of learning life's tough lessons the hard way. To slip myself a note from the future is like telling a school kid all the answers to the finals before he even learned any of it in class. To say the least it wouldn't have made any sense to him. And then there's the butterfly effect (no explanation of the term necessary thanks to Hollywood). What I would get after I make the round trip and pull the time machine over at the curb of Present Time will in fact be a lesser me. In both substance and quality. In the end I would have been better protected from the brutalities of life—and at the same time been made a dimwit in the truest sense of the word.

So there, one of the biggest Sci-Fi aspirations of mankind deciphered. Don't bother cracking the codes of the spacetime continuum, folks. I've figured it out and it's not worth the hassle.

Although I wouldn't mind meeting myself incognito ten or twenty years back just for the kicks. Or conduct history's first double-blinded, conscious, out-of-body experiment on oneself. Just to find out if I've really been the product of my own good opinion of myself.

2 comments:

adelaine said...

there is this chick lit book.. The Time Traveler's Wife - check it out if you have the time, the movie is coming out soon but i heard it was not as good as the book.

It is more of a girly book but well written to explore all the what ifs in life and indeed is love timeless..

also explore the time-space continuum thingee..from my own conclusion as the book assumes that indeed infinite n- dimension and then time it is a circle. which would explain free will and destiny... hahha back to that stupid topic again.

so you are chosing something that you have already chosen, and the loop goes on and on..

still it is a sad but sweet love story--

Tin Soldier said...

I saw the trailer of the upcoming movie and it looked interesting. But more often than not, the trailers are as good as the movies get!

One movie I'm waiting to see is "The Road", based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy. I've read the book and it's one of the few that I managed to sit through in recent years. It's about the journey of a father and son travelling south of the border in a post-apocalyptic American landscape to escape the cold, while trying to evade bad guys who turned cannibalistic because there weren't much other sort of food to consume after the world ended... Another one of those sad, sad stories.

《我們青春的三言兩語》

他跟她是隔壁班 每當他出現在她的面前 她都愛靜觀他的一舉一動 然後幻想兩個人在一起的畫面 中學時期過了 當然兩個人也沒在一起 是他因為害怕而錯過了 二十年後 他們重遇在他的工作室 成了要好的朋友 她問他有沒有喜歡的人 他愣住了...