The Sense of an Ending.

For the last post of 2024 as many of us look back, a combination of visuals and words on the conflation of time and memory…

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

“I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”

“How often do we write our own endings?”

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Words by Julian Barnes from his book “The Sense of an Ending”