William Buechner Pens, The Old Man On The Train

John McTaggart in his essay “Time” presents a radical argument that claims time is unreal. While the argument is interesting and has attracted much attention for his arguments, I remain unconvinced of the argument he makes. This paper will lay out McTaggart’s argument that time in unreal, critically analyze why I believe McTaggart’s argument fails and present an alternative idea about time, utilizing aspects of McTaggart’s argument.

On the other hand “Your Attention Please” is recalling a protocol message in the event of a nuclear attack. Porter is predicting that through the development of technology, weaponry and war, human society has created an environment where the main priority is the individual’s survival: “Leave the old and bed-/ridden, you can do nothing for them”. The poem refers frequently to religion, making it clear to the broadcast’s audience

important to us, or us missing out on life’s little moments, we must all make sacrifices in order to

[Literature] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world.

Very often people live their lives without the awareness of the basic structures that they are exposed to and adapted into. The very things that regulate our day to day lives are often overlooked or never noticed. Johnson discovered this while vacationing in Mexico. While appreciating his time away from home, he came to realize that he had lost his actual sense of time. This created a feeling of uneasiness and the general feeling of being lost. Johnson wasn’t lost in the sense of being in an unidentified place; he was lost due to his withdrawal from his cultural time structure. Nature is not defined by minutes, hours, weeks, or years. “Time” is a creation of people, yet in some cultures is regarded as being “natural”. Because systems are integral to culture, Johnson came to realize that time organization is much more than creating a distinction between specific moments within a given day. He realized that the concept of time was created to allow a cultural structure to regulate itself and to organize the people within it. It allows for efficiency and the ability of people to conduct themselves within their culture’s expectations.

Once I started reading this piece, I felt it was going to be hard to read, or it was going to be a boring reading to be more specific. However, after a few minutes of reading it I capture all my attention.

18 hours: a time frame that is simultaneously an eternity, and a brief nap I can never seem to settle in to. 18 hours: the time it took for my mother to give birth to me. 18 hours: the time spent in an airplane on a flight home, a home I’d never stepped foot in before, and a place I’ve been homesick for since. My sister and I sit in the cold, iron body of the airplane as it barrels towards the foreign concept of home faster than the speed of sound. Sharing weird ticks and ways of passing the time, ways you can honestly only pick up from someone who’s innate code and heritage are so identical. 18 hours: dreary eyes filled with sleep, a little intoxicated and a little delirious. Papers and books strewn over our seats from my 20-year curated collection- blockbusters from last summer paused on Qantas in-flight TVs. Piecing games and word associations together as if we’re intellectuals, although our mental states are far from it. The relevant words jump at me from the page in a short moment of clarity. It was Mark Twain that declared “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” The latter is never as simple as it sounds.

* Denis Waitley once said that “Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”

One day, I could be hanging out at my friends after school, shooting for the 3 pointer and making those slick rebounds. Just then I could blink without the fear of being blind for those hundreds of milliseconds, I could suddenly end up at graduation, ready to embark in a new journey with new friends with most of my old friends gone, making me wish for a better appreciation of those golden moments. This measure of existence’s endless duration drives me insane; exactly how is 1 hour an hour? An hour for me could last 40 minutes, 25 minutes or even 10 minutes. Yet, as time does really fly by the second, it has shown me something I could appreciate over time. As my journey goes on, I’ve lost friends and missed opportunities and I could only reminisce

Time is a tectonic plaque; fickle and unpredictable, never still. At this moment, I would trade anything – even my first edition of The Little Prince – for the sky to be closer and for the lights to never set back. I think of my mother again, who at my age wished for time to fly by as fast as possible, clung onto her engagement to a faceless man while cradling the hope of a better life. Her mind grew up to be so narrow and oppressed by uneducated people and poor circumstances that being a spouse became the only identity she craved. Like Jupiter, my mother deceived people into stamping her as nothing more than a luminous sphere to gaze at, when in reality she was a solid, strong, permanent thing with her children as moons orbiting around her.

Time and time again, I find myself sitting, thinking, and letting my mind wander wherever it takes me. In the most intricate trails of thought, I am able to bend time. My thought processes carry me into new grounds–uncharted territories–that in no way, shape or form represent the mechanical ticking of a clock. What is felt to be hours of deep concentration about inventions, ideas and far-away places that–in reality–consumed just a few brief minutes.

Bishop alludes to other works as a way of furtherly enhancing the reader's understanding of the text. As a reader we are often left to reevaluate and interrogate our initial confrontations of the original text. It allows for tension to be built up as our initial expectations are negated. We are often left to draw parallels in

Memories are the most valued treasures of humans because they make up who we are today. Without

There will be one moment in our life that could be important and symbolic to us. It could be simple ones or even complicated ones. Sometimes, seeing electricity for the first time could transform someone’s life. Even searching for your cultural identity could be significant to you.

In my world time is like sand falling through a large hourglass. I am stuck at the bottom and all I can see is sand falling through. I do not know how much sand is up there, as I do not know how much time I have left in this world. So with every falling grain I panic and push forward towards what I want to accomplish with my life. Everyone in this world sees the sand falling from their hourglass and panics. They will rush over to their children who don’t yet worry if their sand will run out and hug them with all their strength. These people try to stay awake all night, reading books and working on various projects. When they become tired they lay down in the sand that was their past, and they think about what they could have done better. Each grain of sand is a memory that they can pick up and relive. Some of the older people will dig for hours just to reach the bottom of their glass to relive a moment when their joints were less stiff, and their pile of sand was much smaller. They then place this grain of sand where it was and go back to the present, where they can again watch their life go by, measured by the constant patter of sand. I do not dig for my old memories, but instead I trudge through the sand that I know I haven’t made the most out of. I look down at my spent life in disgust. I could run out of sand at any moment, but still I stand here not getting done all the things that I want to get done. When I take a moment to look out the window I see a group of