Time Dilation Through Perception

           I noticed during the reading that there was one set of ideas that kind of stuck out as important in the novel, and those were the ideas about the fact that life is not anywhere near as interesting as in literature. The narrator seems to be jealous of the fact that Adrian’s parents actually left him, leaving him with a component of his life that is worthy of a story. I have a feeling that the narrator is going to find out that even though he really desired to have something in his life that stood out enough to be in literature, that he will regret ever having wanted something like that, because he cannot truly understand the suffering certain people go through. The author also makes a mention in one line about ‘time speeding up’ which seems insignificant at the time, but when I thought about the idea, it is a lot more interesting. The saying goes that ‘time flies while you are having fun’ but the idea that as life gets going, time seems to be quicker, longer periods of time make up less and less of your conscious memory. This concept is both as interesting as it is terrifying, the fact that time is never going to slow back down, everything is going to go faster and faster as you progress in life, more events are going to happen and you are going to have more responsibilities at each step. This seems to be in line with Barnes’ idea of the pens and how when you finally escape one pen, the expanse seems endless even though it still has boundaries. The book seems to be centered on certain themes like this, the complete certainties of life, the fact that there will always be boundaries, yet the book seems to be getting towards the idea that time is not necessarily one of those ideas. The fact that you can seemingly change the amount of time something takes by simply observing the time or perceiving it differently seems like it might be an important theme later on in the book. If not, it is still an interesting idea nonetheless.