I wrote this anti-novel/biography/fiction twenty-two years ago. Still love it. It’s authentic, uncompromising and totally real. A stream of thoughts, ideas and views. Here’s an extract:
53 and imploding eBook : goodwin, opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
I am 53 years old. That astonishes me. I am growing old. Already my body aches and shows a strange inability to co-ordinate itself and a lack of suppleness that makes me almost doddery. My mind is not as nimble. I am overweight and unfit and have little desire to be otherwise. I am constantly tired. The wild creature of my youth is distantly glimpsed as a crazy rampaging fool I envy but am detached from. It seems that I am fast becoming an old fool. No sooner have you orientated yourself, got started, than it is almost over. How can that be? Life stretched on forever. Days were eternal. We had time to sit and dream. Ah, that we have lived so long to see our dreams destroyed.
Seconds. Can’t you feel them ticking. Seconds.
I can’t write ends. What is an end? Nothing ends. I can only attempt to write beginnings. Even that is absurd. I can write within mere seconds. All of them are now. Each second is an action; a thought; an idea; a memory; an almighty beginning and an almighty end.
There is nothing in the past. Even my memories are new. I make them all anew. They are events seen through these old eyes, thought through these old neurones. Each memory is refined and twisted. We remember the bits we want and some of the bits that we don’t want but most is tossed into the sea of forever. We have no history but the one we build for ourselves.
Seconds. How many left? A few? A few hundred? A few million? It’s not he seconds that count; it’s what you fill them with.
I love old things: rocks; buildings; trees. I love old things because they speak to me of forever. I can sense the magic in them; the hands that have touched them, the imagination that created them and the minds that wondered at them.
Our minds are so puny. We are so arrogant. We think our lives important.
It’s strange how we conveniently forget. We build huge cities and think they will stand forever. We excavate old cities and wonder at their splendour without realising that all our cities will burn, be toppled and forgotten. New cultures may wonder over them and marvel at our cunning – the things we have done with our seconds. They may wonder at our stupidity and how we could possibly have let it all slip between the cracks we created through our selfish greed and vanity.
Archaeologists will carefully brush the dirt from the remains of our lives and piece our dreams together.
This is how we filled our seconds. We are not forever. We are only a brief second in forever, a blink, a swearword, a gasp and ….. gone.