Quando omni flunkus, mortati.

"When all else fails, play dead."

Holy hiatus, Batman! How did six months pass in what seems like only six weeks? A spur-of-the-moment trip to London threw me out of the blogosphere for about a month while I researched and traveled. After that, I have no good excuse for not posting except for an extremely busy work schedule that depleted my creative energy. But no self-kicking allowed—I did just take a five-week memoir writing course, during which I wrote for far more than 365 minutes. That completed, and work back to normal, I am now happily resurrected and re-energized.

I do believe that time really does fly, faster and faster, the older one gets. Perhaps it's the contrast of our bodies and minds moving more slowly against the ever-speeding-up of the technological world around us... I can't think of a likely explanation for the phenomenon, but it reminds me of one of my favorite books—one that I re-read every few years, and that has had a tremendous impact on my philosophy of life and time—Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman.

What is time? Does it have shape or mass? Is it fluid? How does one explain déjà vu? Lightman explores these concepts and more through about 30 brief chapters, each a unique time-world, each a dream of his fictional Einstein.

In one world, time moves backwards; in another, at high velocity. Sometimes it moves in fits and starts; and at others, in repeating circles. In all cases, people's understanding of how time works influences how they live their lives—whether they live on mountains, race from place to place, live in constant fear, or record every action in an effort to remember it. And each dream offers a theory that explains why people in this "real" world are as they are.

"16 April, 1905" is one of my favorite dreams: "In this world, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze. Now and then, some cosmic disturbance will cause a rivulet of time to turn away from the mainstream, to make connection backstream. When this happens, birds, soil, people caught in the branching tributary find themselves suddenly carried to the past."

People who have hiccuped to the past wear dark clothes and carefully tiptoe around, trying not to alter anything in that time, lest they alter the future—their futures and themselves—as a result. They lurk in corners and hide under bridges, waiting for time to deliver them forward to where they came from. They aim for invisibility, ignoring stares and not participating in life. A person from the future "is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time." These future-people are lurking in every city. "They are not questioned about coming events, about future marriages, births, finances, inventions, profits to be made. Instead, they are left alone and pitied."

I love Lightman's brevity, concise words and strings of repeating structures that, together, lend a lyrical, dreamy quality to each story; and I love that each dream makes me question what I perceive to be reality. So maybe that loony guy who sleeps in a box in the alcove and whimpers to himself isn't so loony, after all... Who am I to say?