Time, memory and loss

Oh, Cozy, I take it ALL back. However much string you need, just tell me. He gave me a rough outline of his idea today. Even if the Kings found out about it, they could never do it, not in a million years! I don't care how much time he costs me........This I have to see!

What? All in good time.

Funny thing time, well at least for you. I find it hard to grapple with your concept of time. It's a bit like Averroes' rather tenuous grasp on tragedy and comedy. You kind of think you've got it but the concepts are so alien to your way of thinking that you can't really be sure that you're thinking along the right lines at all.

Time doesn't really exist for us. We remember the past, we like to think about the future but I really don't think we do it in the same way you do. So I remember being in the creche, listening to tales, or just being hungry, but I don't feel them as happening in some OTHER 'space', 'time'. When I remember them, it's NOW that they're happening, it's like they're not fixed. If I just shut my ears off now, I believe I won't hear the tale. If I think about the future, it's like it's happening now, and what I think about becomes the past after I've thought about it. Does that make any sense to you? That everything you can think is in a perpetual present?

You see, from what I've read of what you've written, I think that I will stop being a penguin at some point and just be some detritus on the ocean floor or a constituent of a seal's faeces. Your logic in this respect is almost unassailable. My problem is that although I kind of believe that, I'm not, NOW, detritus on the ocean floor or sealshit. So if I'm thinking it, it's already happened. But I'm still here, as much a penguin as Havelock or Cozy and so it hasn't happened, therefore death or an end to existence doesn't actually exist.

Is that hard for you to comprehend? In some ways, Havelock's tale says it all. When I wrote about Myfanwy, I tried to put it in terms you'd understand. Something that would allow you a glimpse into Havelock's pain. Your literature is full of such loss. But you see, for Havelock, when he remembers, it is NOW. It isn't something that happened, it is something that IS happening. His is not a remembered pain, a remembered sadness, it is exactly the same pain as he experienced. Can YOU understand that. He goes through all of the uncertainty of whether Myfanway will return, the weakening chick, his desperate effort to feed the chick from his miniscule resources, her failure to return and the chick's death every single time. With your concept of time, can you really understand that?

Ah, but penguins have no soul so why should you worry.