Folding paper

Here's an old trick that story tellers like to do. You draw a line across a piece of paper. On one end you write "born" and on the other end you write "died". Then you fold the paper in half and... voila! Birth and death touch each other and are handily (tear-jerkingly) juxtaposed. Countless movies start with a death scene and then jump backwards.








For me though, it's how this trick can work in day to day life that is startling and moving. Proust talked about it at the start of his enormous book I've read the start of five times: he takes a little tea with a biscuit and this particular taste vividly and suddenly brings back his childhood at Combray.

The best movie I have seen that catches this way the mind can suddenly fold time is Hiroshima Mon Amour.

A woman is standing by the side of a bed looking down at her lover. Her lover is lying face down, asleep, with one arm outstretched across the sheets. His hand twitches, we see her seeing this movement, and there is suddenly a jump cut to another man's hand, giving the same twitch, but lying on some cobbles. As fast as it has flashed before us the film returns to the woman looking down at the bed.

Richard's last comment reminded me of something my mother said a couple of weeks ago. She came into the bathroom while I was bathing Eleanor and said how much Eleanor looked like me when I had been her age.

Soon I am going back to Japan. I have not been there for five years and a lot of me is tied up in that place. I think it will be a very intense experience, and time and memory will be very fragile things.