"How swift is the passing of terrestrial things. How brief is a moment of time lived. How tenuous can memory be when things pass so swiftly. How illusory time must be when maintained at a principle of speed. How passing over the same landscape hundreds of times does not make it many landscapes, but the same terrestrial dream, incapable of explanations, or of minutiae. How a brief life, crowded with significant activity, becomes a long one. How speed makes of nature a painting, a stillness, thus contradicting the laws of visual motion. How a new life paradigm can be sketched from the rapid progression through a life that is swept along by the marriage of fate and will. How reality curves. How speed distorts time. How time distorts vision. How memory is a blur, but becomes a briefer blur when speed enters into the picture. How with such quickness it is impossible to linger, in memory, on a single witnessed incident – an adulterous kiss snatched in an orchard, a beautiful girl’s skirt blown high by the wind and revealing curvaceousness in a field of wheat, a man striking another with a shining sickle, seen too fast to ascertain whether it was merely a farmer at work, a moment registered in wrong perspective, or a legitimately witnessed murder. Things that tantalise and infuriate the mind, and which also blot out of perception things subsequently seen. Because for something to be seen requires consciousness, and if the mind is dwelling on a previous detail it see nothing afterwards but its own thoughts and reaction. And so much remains always unseen where is much that fascinates the mind and eye."
Ben Okri. In Arcadia. London: Phoenix, 2003. 118-9.
