The Secret to Time

This whole idea of time and space and what it all means is just mind boggling to me. But I mean that in the best way possible. I really enjoy sitting down and thinking about time and how we will never get that moment back, or that moment, or that moment. Even as someone reads this post, time is passing and these words trigger some sort of feeling or meaning or whatever in the reader. I wanted to touch on what Maggie said about how we as an American society never really sit back and think about time or for that matter nothing at all. I feel our capitalistic, hustle bustle culture doesn't really allow us to enjoy the finer points of life. Meditiation is one way of realiving the stress that we put upon ourselves but I also think there are other ways. Just taking a step back to enjoy what is going on around you is another way to ground yourself in order to refresh the mind. As James Taylor so eloquently states, "the secret to life is enjoying the passage of time." I find this to be so true and our culture doesn't seem to have come to grips with this idea.

After reading McCloud and his comic strip, I get this small sense that he seems to know what he is talking about. There are so many techniques that can be used to represent time and how we perceive it. While this idea of history, the present, and the future have been analyzed by many people over the years, including Mcluhen, it is nice to see a fresh perspective on the idea. By just drawing a picture McCloud somehow can stop time within the story. While this doesn't stop time for the reader, I still become mesmerized in the fact that the story is no longer progressing, but instead is well, freeze framed. A book or written media could never do this. The reader is always reading something, words are always explaining the setting as time drifts by. So in this way I feel that comics or drawing or art, as Mcluhen said, is the only way to actually live in the present instead of the past.