October 2015, Vaslui
The father goes to the market to buy some pears. He returns with some cheese. He also brings flowers for the mother, which end up in a beautiful vase with no water in. The father eats a slice of cake, which the daughter prepared the night before – a pear and chocolate cake. The pears got sliced and topped up with some cream – all buried deep inside the heart of the cake. That’s why the father couldn’t find any left at the market. They were all gone, lost between sweet layers of memory. That’s how time flies, taking our selves with it.
I think this piece of philosophical text can have many definitions depending who reads it but it sort of leaving me a sense that this is about the need of communication in the environment/community you live in to be more efficient in every way. For instance father could have asked what to buy before going to the market and daughter could have told him that she bought everything before him so father would not have to buy flowers to calm the mother down (please) because the vase was anyways empty, so I don’t know, might be wrong but I thing it is about the urgency of communication
That was an interesting perspective on the nature of time, on how when ignorance prevails we tend not to pay attention to the finer moments in life.
Meaning to say that when a person is unaware of their surroundings, time keeps going. This relates to what Ana-Maria said in the comment on how time or how she put ‘pegasus’ can leave one with a bitter-sweet experience when one tries to play catch-up with time. I like Alinas’ comment on how she explained when someone misses an opportunity there is always a possibility of something better coming along.
This is an interesting way of explaining how one could lose out if they do not pay attention. The daughter made a cake the night before, therefore, the father should have known that there would either be no pears or very few pears left at the market. However, this story also tells how even though you miss out, another good may come of a situation, in this case the father came back with flowers which might have pleased the mother. Another metaphor could be seen within the fact that the pears were hidden inside the cake so even if the father saw the cake, he might not have known there were pears inside, meaning one must look beneath the layers. Or this could be seen as a miscommunication within the household of the father, mother and daughter, more broadly, one must learn to communicate in the environment in which one lives in.
Interesting short story. Sounds like a daily routine for some people. What I can notice from the story, that it mostly sounds like a metaphor, but a lot of it sounds like a real life one. The life is so short, and everyone should enjoy the time they are given, with no regrets and with a lot of joy in their eyes.
If there is one thing that I found while traveling over fall break, it is that time is most definitely fleeting. One of the saddest moments is when an experience becomes a quiet memory. We try to take photographs to preserve a wonderful moment, but it is never the same as living in that moment. This is because when we have impactful experiences, we live in them. You cannot really say that when you look at a photo, you are still living there, in that moment, in those experiences. It’s just a reminder of the emotions we felt, the sights we saw, but it can never serve as an adequate replacement. As much as we wish to preserve the present, life does not stop or standstill for us. We can only try to appreciate the time we have before it’s lost forever.
There may be more advantageous ways to look at it (let me try a different metaphor…). What if we do not take the picture in the vain and desperate hope to capture or freeze the moment, but realizing as we do it that we’re at best puting aside small gems for later. Like botled wine, when we open them later, the flavour, the taste would have evolved and developed. We ourselves would have changed, with aging tastebuds and different preferences. The change is nothing to be frightened or sorry off, we just have to train our minds not expect anything to stay the same. I miss my small kids when I see videos of them years ago. I cry and sometimes my arms hurt from longing to hold them again as babies. But I cherish the longing and the tears and I look forward to be older still and crying even harder at the same videos.
A metaphor indeed. But even Lakoff acknowledges that the metaphors we live by are not arbitrary, that there are deep associations behind them, which can tell something essential about our way of being in the world. In this case, it is the image of time as some sort of winged Pegasus carrying us away with it. A bitter-sweet experience, which intensifies when we are faced with the effects of time on different selves. Pegasus seems to fly at various speeds, depending on goodness knows what – and we are left to wonder at each other’s traces, if anything. There you go – a whole feast of metaphors. I guess we should be grateful for the very opportunity to wonder. Cheers!
Time flies… is but one of the many metaphors we employ in our language. In this particular instance, not only does it fly, but it takes us with it (mighty bird, this time fella:). One could almost feel author’s sorrow… Oh dear, life is happening again to poor little me…:). Cheer up, sister …