Us, the most fleeting of all.

For my trip to Arizona I wanted to take an audio book to use as an entertainment device for all of the travel time. My first choice was Children of Dune, but alas I couldn’t play it anywhere buy my computer. So instead I found a book that I’d seen pop up here and there and thought numerous times about consuming. It was The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. And I loved it.

The story is a love story. And Nifengger does a beautiful job of creating the delicate and intricate web of romance. But that wasn’t the amazing part of the book.

What was so spectacular about this story was the antagonist, Time. You see Henry, by a flaw of genetics, is a time traveler. A time traveler who has no control over his position in time. Niffenegger treats his condition so realistically it makes it totally believable.

The thing I loved most however is her ability to comprehend the complexities of time. Clair, described in the title, maintains a simple linear life. But Henry is constantly moving about from the here and now into the past, or sometimes the future. And it is not always, but quite frequently he interacts with his own life, even his own self. So in the end the story line is basically unfolding in complex entangled layers. It’s enough to fill my brain for days.

Really it was quite an amazing book. And as an added bonus it had numerous quotations from the Duino Elegies which I am now exploring and loving.



Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

…………….

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

……………..

…Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness, and the long experience of love, - just what is wholly unsayable.

-from The Ninth Duino Elegy,
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Translated by Stephen Mitchell