From "Under the Garden" by Graham Greene

"You get a sense of what I mean when you make love with a girl. The time isn't measured by clocks. Time is fast or slow or it stops for a while altogether. One minute is different to every other minute. When you make love it's a pulse in a man's part which measures time and when you spill yourself there's not time at all. That's how time comes and goes, not by an alarm-clock made by a man with a magnifying glass in his eye. Haven't you ever heard them say, 'It's ----- time' up there?"

This quote has nothing to do with anything as pertaining to the short-story as a whole. The story is the product of a dying man's fantastic vision of life underneath a garden that was a prominent fixture of his youth. The main character of this vision is an extremely old Methusalah-type character, known as Javitt. Javitt spouts off wise and cryptic, life-altering messages such as the one above.

This hasn't been a suitable background so far, so let's get back to the quote. The old man, who as a young boy listens to this quote, is known simply as Wilditch. You will note that he refrains from outright stating, 'It's fucking time.' Wilditch is of an age when the shock of the word is simply too much for an innocent boy of ten or twelve is unable to bear. At any rate, I thought all of this was terribly interesting because what the reader is given is a sense that our protagonist is able to grasp or is on the verge of grasping a very mature and adult understanding of physical love (i.e. fucking). Furthermore, later on in the story, this vision of a strange sort of life living under the garden reveals Wilditch's well-formed idea of the perfect girl. This girl is the supposed daughter of Javitt, Miss Ramsgate. In a couple of words, she is extremely beautiful and free-spirited. Wilditch's life goal becomes to seek this girl out, and from this point on in his young life, he begins his journeys throughout the whole world. Whether or not he succeeds is open to interpretation. I presume that, as a life-long traveler, he is set to explore the treasures that the after-life will grant onto him. I also presume that he did not find that perfect girl.

Per usual, I thought it a strange coincidence that I managed to read this story for the first time while coming back to College Station from Atlanta. I think all of this begs the question, "Will I look back at my life at some old age and think that I had a well-formed view of love?" Maybe I will realize that right now I'm acting the fool. At any rate, time doesn't slow down for you when you're 'fucking.' Maybe in the past, it's as simple as saying that I've been a selfish lover; but during the physical act, thoughts can wander. I think it is a rare moment when I can say that I've been completely engaged in another person -- the physical and emotional concurrently. At this point in my life, probably because I'm just a big kid at the ripe old age of 22, nothing slows time down more than laughter. By that logic, where being in love is signified by the slow passage of time, love equals hours of giddy, light-hearted laughter.

From Special Relativity, we are introduced to the concept, "moving clocks turn slow." Photons, which are massless and move at a constant velocity equal to the universal speed limit, do not decay. Throughout my Jesuit preparatory school education, we were given many instances throughout history where the traditional understanding of God was intricately tied together with the understanding of light. The people who came to these understandings had no way of knowing the current physical understanding of light. There's nothing worse than being in the dark.