The Long Sunday Afternoon

Sundays can be strange days. Time can do some pretty odd things on the seventh day of the week. 

Indeed, Sunday can be a curiosly loooooooong day. .....  and yet also,  at the same time and once passed, often appear to have gone in an instant.

It is this strange and conflicting sensation that can leave me of a late Sunday evening, contemplating the feeling of profound temporal distortion.

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Lying on the Imperial couch this last Sunday, I was reminded of that fantastic 1960's movie, The Time Machine, based on the famous H. G. Wells novel of the same title. 

Its a firm favourite, most notably because of the distinct sense of Victorian placement; antiquated science fiction, coupled with some quite brilliant 1960's stop-motion film and xylophone sound effects. Features that - in themselves - lend a quality of time and place, not to be replicated by any sexy CGI-reliant remakes [they tried and failed with a 2002 movie version].

Dressed in smoking jacket and slippers, utilising a sedan chair time-conveyance, powered by umbrella motor, our hero sets off on an adventure that spans time and the ages. 

[The Time Machine, 1960. Click to Play]

I tell you, its much like I feel on most given Sundays ....



For the 1960 movie, directed by George Pal, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054387/

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The Stoic philosopher Seneca, had some opinions about the passing of time and the 'Shortness of Human Life':

II

"Why do we complain of Nature? She has shown herself kindly; life, if you know how to use it, is long. But one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralysed by sloth; one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others, another, driven on by the greed of the trader, is led over all lands and all seas by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own; some there are who are worn out by voluntary servitude in a thankless attendance upon the great; many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men's fortune or in complaining of their own; many, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn—so surely does it happen that I cannot doubt the truth of that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: "The part of life we really live is small." For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time."