When it comes to Fuentes using "you", I was never fully convinced that it was myself. I really tried to be sucked into it to have the effect that was supposed to happen, but the fact that he used a name with "you" made the effect different for me. I'm not Felipe, and I'm not male. idk.. Maybe my mind was just too resistant with this book.
And the concept of time absolutely fascinates me in this novella. I'm sure some others have used this quote, but for my paper I used, "You don't look at your watch again, that useless object tediously measuring time in accordance with human vanity, those little hands marking out the long hours that were invented to disguise the real passage of time, which races with a mortal and insolent swiftness no clock could ever measure. A life, a century, fifty years: you can't imagine those lying measurements any longer, you can't hold that bodiless dust within your hands."
It really calls attention to the fact that humans never fully have a grasp on the concept of time. We can try to manage it as much as we like, but isn't it amazing that our busy minds let time seem as if it is going swiftly, and when our unoccupied minds are bored or restless, the seconds drag on as if into eternity?
We can never hold on to one moment. Time is intangible as Fuentes says, yet we put a description on it, a measurement for the distance between the event and when we remember it. Time means nothing to us without memory. We can remember our smooth faces when we grow up to find lines around our mouth and eyes. Our minds recognize the change, and we classify the change as time. Its kinda hard for me to get this out. I can't exactly explain it. Does anyone know what I'm trying to say that can put it more eloquently?
I love that Fuentes makes it possible in his novella to hold a little something of the past. It gives a way to escape or to hope for such a thing to happen to us--to regain that time long ago (a memory), and to relive it again.
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