Imagine that (insert appropriate continuation of opener).  That’s one of the few ways we were told last year in 10 Honors was an acceptable intro for an essay.  Imagine that ..., meant to place a reader of the essay (a reader that could not be mentioned or addressed, because that would be bad form) in a mindset that would prepare the reader for the remainder of the essay.  Or, to be honest, it was for many of us simply a way to get the points for a good grabber/hook idea that hadn’t been declared cliché or too “eighth grade” by our teachers.

In this case, however, the “imagine …” intro is actually rather appropriate, so: Imagine something, anything.  Why?  Talking about the importance of time’s effect on verisimilitude in The Things They Carried made me think as I was hurriedly packing up to leave, ironically short on time, of a quote I remembered from somewhere, “If time is an illusion, then all objects are stationary or imagined.”  The Greek philosopher Parmenides said that, “What is various and mutable, all development, is a delusive phantom.” (Parmenides)  What he means is that if time is an illusion, nothing that exists can change or move.  This makes sense if you think of the physics – changes in displacement, velocity, acceleration, and impulse are all dependent on time.  If time is an illusion, matter can neither move nor change.  If time truly exists only in our imagination, than we ourselves do not exist, because we are never stationary completely.  Our hearts beat.  Our blood flows.  Our brains think.  Ready for a very confusing idea?  Warning – mind may be blown.  If time is imagined, than when you imagine something, you are imaginary – imagine that.  If that makes no sense to you, feel free to imagine that it does, so it will.  Although, if time is an illusion, and we are consequently nonexistent, what does it matter if you understand or not?  Why does anything matter?

Don’t worry, you matter; we all do. That whole thing about time being an illusion is just that - an illusion.  How do we know?  Well, all you have to do is think about it.  Really, it’s that simple – just think.  In fact, you needn’t ponder about the nature of time at all.  Instead, you can think about what you are going to have for dinner, whom you will have it with, and how good it will taste.  That is the undeniable proof that time exists: we can think.  If time were not real, we would be incapable of thinking, because the neural connections in our brain would not be able to transmit signals. 

Parmenides said, “to be imagined and to be able to exist are the same thing.” (Parmenides)  If he realizes that he contradicts his previously quoted claim in this way, he doesn’t seem to care – I think philosophers like confusion.  If something exists because we imagine it, and we imagine time, than time exists.  If time exists, than motion and change not only exist, but are inevitable.

            O’Brien demonstrates the influence of time and imagination upon reality in his anachronistic collection of short stories, The Things They Carried.  O’Brien does not force the reader to observe strict chronological order – if he did so, that would limit the reader’s imaginative perception, and therefore, the verisimilitude, of O’Brien’s stories.  O’Brien dismisses the importance of what he calls “happening truth”, instead relying upon “story truth”.  In his opinion, something needs not to have occurred in the past to be true.  Instead, O’Brien believes that as long as something can be imagined, it is real.  He states at one point, “That’s a true story that never happened.” (O’Brien 80) 

O’Brien agrees with Parmenides that if something can be imagined, than it exists – though with an interesting difference of philosophical distinction.  Parmenides believed that if something is imagined, then it exists in the sense of O’Brien’s “happening truth”.  To O’Brien, however, if something is imagined, the power of existence that imagination gives the imagined thing transcends the power of normal “happening truth”.  To O’Brien, truth in the imagination is the most powerful form of existence.

A final thought: according to Parmenides and O’Brien, all things imagined exist, right?  So if you imagine that that Parmenides is the inventor of Parmesan, he actually is, by his own reasoning.  I imagine I’ll go eat some noodles with parmesan.  What do you imagine?

For more on Parmenides, visit
http://www.iep.utm.edu/parmenid/



Parmenides