it took me a along time to finish this book. there had been a lot of in-between digressions as i tried to take in winterson's imaginative ideas. i went back to different times as the book became the medium of my time travel. although the story is set in the middle ages, i still found it to have impacted me in some sort of way. what is past if not present and future interwoven in harmony, and vice versa? and that is one thing i've learnt about the linear nature of time.
My experience of time is mostly like my experience with maps. Flat, moving in a more or less straight line from one point to another. Being in time, in a continuous present, is to look at a map and not see the hills, shapes and undulations, but only the flat form. There is no sense of dimension, only a feeling for the surface. Thinking about time is more dizzy and precipitous.
Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief.
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular - an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
Outside of the rules of daily time, not to be is exact as to be. We can't talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that it is infinite. So what the universe doesn't contain is as significant to us as what it does. There will be a moment (though of course it won't be a moment) when we will know (though knowing will no longer be separate from being) that we are a part of all we have met and that all we have met was already a part of us.
i have dog-eared a lot of pages in stc (mostly on the 12 dancing princesses' part). winterson's words are incomparably poetic and lyrical, and her ideas conjunct with them effortlessly. however, i had to read some paragraphs out loud to make out the alliterations and allusions. it wasn't an easy read i gathered since the setting goes back a long way in time. one of these days, i will try to read it again as i can't exactly pinpoint what/whom the author's referring to.
it would be impossible for me to summarize the book because i intentionally lived in the moments of each scenes. it was, for me, a spectral collection of intermingling stories that may have/may have not occurred in the same time frame. and i like it most especially as it gave me the feeling of not being time's slave.
all in all, it was a so-so read. i didn't see kundera's philosophical insights though, like what i was told re: San Francisco's Chronicle review, but its similarity to the arabian nights was interestingly observed. perhaps i just need to leaf through this highly-acclaimed oeuvre of winterson once more.
