Einstein believed that publishing his theory of relativity would end all thinking about time.

Now scientists believe we have a mirror universe, a “reflection” of our universe where time flows backward from the future to the past.

The “arrow of time” either points in one direction or in two directions, forward and back.

Why not in all directions, like a minute hand? Or in all directions, like everything?

I want to experience my past again, but as I was then, doing what I did then—nothing changed.

In what sense, then, am I not living through it, again and again?

Isn’t the past always happening?

The Vagueness of the Moment

I saw a dead bunny in the grass, all bloody and ravaged—

First by a dog or a hawk and now covered in ants.

I stopped to look at it but did not photograph it.

There’s no time for mourning; the deaths fall

Into the void of unceremony

And become one death.

It’s not some monolith, they say about everything,

But everything is a monolith,

A wave that never collapses.

I play an eight-hour track of rain sounds on windows

All day on a loop. The sky is too high

And I want to feel crushed.

The vagueness of the moment

Has a crispness in memory,

Like mountains from a distance.

I’m Not Mourning (There Is Voids)

I had it again, the dream that I lose my bags in the airport and miss my flight to Paris.

Every time, it’s devastating.

I’ve never been to Paris, in real life or in a dream.

Awake, I sometimes feel that it’s too late (in history) to go to Paris.

Paris syndrome is a state of “extreme shock” experienced by travelers forced to reconcile Paris-in-reality with their expectations—it can cause acute anxiety, despair, hallucinations, delusions, and “depersonalization,” the impression of observing yourself from the outside.

The sense that your self has left your body—you have depersoned.

Unlike Stendhal syndrome, a condition that occurs when one is overcome by the beauty and profundity of great art, Paris syndrome is the result of “immense disappointment” in the face of the banality of Paris.

Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.

In the mourning journal he wrote in the months following his mother’s death in 1977, Roland Barthes quotes Donald Winnicott: “The catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.”

Less than three years after his mother, Barthes died from injuries sustained when he was hit by a laundry van while walking through the streets of Paris.

Pierre Curie was also killed in the streets of Paris, in 1906. He fell in the rain, and a horse-drawn cart wheeled over his head.

He was already weakened by massive exposure to radiation.

From Marie Curie’s mourning journal: “My Pierre, the life is atrocious without you, it is an anguish without name.”

There is almost something romantic about dying from “complications.”

Romanticism makes of all death a romance.