Breaking the barriers of time and the conventions of reality: written before the series "Gazing into the Eyes of Time"

【Gazing into the eye of time】

"Then an astronomer said, Master, what about time?
He replied: You want to measure the infinite and immeasurable time.
You want to adjust your actions and even the direction of your soul according to the hours and seasons.
You want to make time into a stream, and then sit on the embankment and watch its flow.
But the timeless thing within you realizes the timelessness of life,
And understand that yesterday is just a memory of today, and tomorrow is just a dream of today.
and he who sings and meditates in you,
Still living in the moment when the stars were first scattered across space.
Who among you does not feel that his capacity to love is unlimited?
Yet he sensed that the same love, though infinite, lay at the center of his being.
When it is running, it does not go from one love thought to another love thought.
Nor from one act of love to another act of love.
Isn't time, like love, indivisible and without space? "

─Excerpted from "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran

The most commonly used coordinate axes when people understand themselves, interpret history, and describe the universe are time and space. For individual lives, from the moment they fall to the ground until they leave this world, the average lifespan of a person is several decades. No matter how you use it, the decades will pass, and they will pass like this... It seems to be ordinary and simple. However, when people gradually grow up and get rid of the ignorance of time in childhood, and step out of the peach blossom garden where "I don't know Han, Wei and Jin" at the beginning of life, I realize that the age of a person is actually limited between the rising and setting of the sun and the ticking of the pendulum. produce two completely different attitudes.

The first is to cherish, "I advise you not to cherish your gold-threaded clothes, I advise you to cherish your youth", "If a young man does not work hard, an old man will be sad." From the ancient people's earnest advice to today's people, every second counts, advocating time management, and cherishing time. portrayal. Another attitude is profligacy, which results from regarding the completion of physical life as an end. Since the end is destined to be drawn, before that, why not have wine now and get drunk now, and fill the days and nights with eating, drinking, merrymaking, wine and sex?

Whether it is cherishing minutes or squandering years, it is the attitude and method of using time. But if we could temporarily stop our busy pace and gaze deeply into the eyes of time - would the various mysteries we see and cannot see make us confused, surprised, and sigh? What exactly is time? Where does the river of time originate? Where does it flow to? Could the river freeze, flood, or dry up? What people, things, and things are irrigated and nourished by rivers and canals?

The more basic the questions in life, the harder it is to find simple and unified answers. If you extend your thoughts beyond the horizon at this time, you might be able to make new discoveries. Fantasy literature, a genre that has set off a trend in reading culture in recent years due to the popularity of "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings", is not actually an innovative genre. For more than a hundred years, first-class writers and thinkers (including Christians and non-Christians) have used the free nature of fantasy literature to subvert or reconstruct the rules of real-life games in stories, so as to inspire readers to look at it from a different perspective. Reality.

"Gazing into the Eye of Time" is a series of columns that will invite readers to put on different glasses to gaze and examine the "Eye of Time" through representative works of Western juvenile fantasy novels. May the fantasy author's diligent questioning of time bring fresh impact to the minds and hearts of Christians who claim to hold the key to eternal life.