21st Century Literature and Time

 For this reading, you will need Lyric Genius and the song 'Five Years' by David Bowie playing in the background.  David Bowie is a nostalgic artist for me. I remember my decent into loving his music very well, and for that I have a lot of memories that I can associate with different songs of his. It's a really wonderful way to create an album of memories, an amalgamation of songs that can take us through time. This song, 'Five Years,' is one of my favorites, for a long while because I thought it was masterfully composed and lyrically powerful. I have reanalyzed this song more closely for my music theory class this semester and doubled down in what I believed, because the class has given me the words to describe it's artistry, but I think in looking at the song so analytically it has taken away from the most amazing part of the music.  For a bit of background, the song is featured on Bowie's album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.  'Five Years...

Dear Sarah,                                                                                                                                     12/20/22   Hi there. I just wanted to take a moment (or perhaps several) with you and talk about time. I think, for us, time has been quite strange. We’ve been friends for over a decade now and so much, unsurprisingly and surprising...

  Will Pikus               Though all of the texts we read in class were exceptional, there was one that will stick with me for the rest of my life. A Tale for the Time Being was one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. Not only was the discussion of Schrodinger’s cat interesting, the fact that the theory of relativity was brought into discussion was also relevant. It’s something that I’ve really never thought about before, but now I think about it at least twice a day.              Since writing the paper on it and studying the topic, the idea of time being relative has affected my life in so many ways. My direct roommate and I have stayed up until the early hours of the morning discussing what it means for time to be relative. While he thinks time is linear and the same for everyone, I can’t help but disagree. I feel that if I slow down ...

  Emma Straus   21 st Century Literature and Time   Final Blog Post   December 2022     Over the course of the semester, I have grown more and more attuned to time. Specifically, time behaving in ways that we have discussed in class. We have explored the various natures of time, as it is not restricted to one depending on the context that it is examined. One quality of time that continually stood out to me was the way in which time behaves in art, whether in writing, photography, or painting. As a creator, I have gravitated toward this idea the most, and I have loved the way in which these creative outlets have become a preservation of time.   I have practiced photography for nearly six years now and I am constantly experimenting and learning. So the idea as photographs as a preservation of time has always been part of my experience. There is a sayi ng that people photograph the things they do not want to lose, or the things they love the most. And ...

  Katie Roessel   21 st Century Literature and Time   12/14/22   Time and How I See It        When I read the prompt for this blog post, to tell any story about time, I began to reflect upon my recent past, how I perceived the passage of time, and the sequence of events that got me to where I am now. I don’t remember too much from when I was a young kid, perhaps deliberately; elementary school was pretty difficult for me, and middle school was torturous, as it is for most prepubescent 12-year-olds.      I think I became the most aware of the passage of time once I got into high school. High school was when life picked up for me both in and out of school. I was becoming more and more dedicated to dance, I was working hard to get good grades to get into a good university when I graduate, and I was growing more into myself, into the person that I am today. During high school everything went so fast. One day, I was sitting in my freshm...

  It was a wicked hot September day, about two weeks after my annual trip to see my grandmother in Florida. Typically a Labor Day excursion, my mother, brother, and father (if he was available) would fly down to sunny Jacksonville to celebrate my and my grandparents' birthdays. My birthday fell just before my grandmother's, and my grandfather followed less than a week after (the third, fourth, and ninth, respectively). That year I gifted my grandmother my most recent read and the next book in the series that we were reading together: Catching Fire. And my grandfather anticipating this got us both the following installment Mockingjay. When I read The Hunger Games (a little bit after the hype but before the movie), I told my grandmother about it on the phone. A few weeks later she was asking my mother for the title and author so that she could read it herself. We chatted about the book over the phone, as she read she would complain about the violence, swoon at the love story, a...

  So this idea came to me as I was falling asleep last night, and was thinking about any final thoughts I had about time. Something I think we never talked about in relation to time, death, and the idea that people are never truly gone is through names. While it is most common to see names passed down through the male side of families, Jr., Sr, the III, some women have family names as well. I am one of them! My full name is Victoria Catherine, and other than my mom, has a part of every other maternal figure in my family that I have met. Victoria was the name of my paternal great-grandma, and Catherine is the name of my maternal and paternal grandmas, as well as my other paternal great-grandma. However, the spelling of Catherine with a “C” is only shared with my maternal grandma, as the rest of them spell it, Katherine. My parents attempted to modernize Catherine by making it Kathryn but decided tradition was best.  Other than names bringing connections to the past, they also...

  A Letter to my Niece J, The world that you are growing up in is not like it was when I was your age. I wish that I could say that it is better, but I truly don’t think it is yet. Hopefully, by the time you’re old enough to read this letter, that isn’t true anymore. But I have no way of knowing what the future will entail, or what events will take place between now and then. Truly, I wish I could protect you from ever learning about the terrible things that have occurred, but I don’t think that would be fair to you. There is so much that you can learn from the past, from things that occurred before your time. While I know it will take several years for you to grow old enough to fully understand the world in which you live, I have some advice from my twenty years of life that I want to provide you with as you learn the truth of our world. It is so easy to lose hope. There are so many things that must change in order for the world to be equal and fair for all people. While this is s...

Dear Class of 2023,    The odds were against us from (almost)   the beginning, but we're here, four years later. No matter how many religions, sciences, philosophies say that time doesn't fly, I'm here to argue that, in our case, it did. We didn't get to live every moment of our college days to the fullest together like Zen Buddhism promotes. We spent months and months that added up to nearly two years at home, living out our college years from our childhood bedrooms with cautious parents begging us to remember to stay six feet apart from our middle school best friends when we went on masked, outdoor walks just to pass the time. I don't count my time at home as part of the college experience, so really, we could all be going around saying we graduated early since we really only had two years on campus.      But why would we want that? College is supposed to be a crucial time in our lives where we gain independence, learn what we want to do with our liv...

  Have you ever seen those commercials for Progressive Insurance about people turning into their parents? (examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfdrZzF_RL0 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RednLQ-4VE )They are commercials advertising young homeowners turning into their parents with small habits; the point being that you cannot save yourself from turning into your parents but you can protect your home with insurance. These commercials have always stuck with me because I found them funny and I have seen in my parents how they have the same small habits as my grandparents do. However, when thinking about time and how time repeats itself, these commercials tie into a bigger picture.  As we have discussed in class, time is not always linear. The past, present, and future are all connected and interact with each other. This is especially true when looking at relationships between parents and their children. Parents see themselves in their children and children adopt some tra...

 A Letter to my Sister, Tess, About Time.  Tess,  I know you don't care about what I have to say much, but if you listen to any advice I give, let it be this: you can't get lost time back.  I admire the way you can go about life not overthinking every choice you make, because believe me, living like this is exhausting. I think there is a mean between us, though. Someone thoughtful yet decisive with their actions. Someone who can act quickly, but does not act irrationally and still takes consequences into consideration. Someone whose empathy leads them to action. Someone who is empathetic.  The way you treat people is so important. If you want to spend as much time as possible with the people that you love, then you should treat them in a way that respects them and shows them how much you appreciate them. You can sometimes be mean, but I know you have a heart in there somewhere. You might do things that you regret or treat people in ways you regret. Admit you're...