One characteristic of the subconscious is a defective sense of time: in dreams the old man sees himself as a boy, and the events of thirty or forty years may be jumbled together. Time as a logical succession of events was Anderson's greatest difficulty in writing novels or even long stories. He got his tenses confused and carried his heroes ten years forward or back in a single paragraph. His instinct was to present everything together, as in a dream.
I have the same problem. Time just doesn't seem linear to me.
I've had the experience more than once of finding a date on a ticket stub or an old letter which proves conclusively that the order of things as I remembered them could not be true. It's always a little disorienting.
I've thought of making an autobiographical blog, but it couldn't possibly be chronological. The memories would be more like a series of colored panes that wouldn't necessarily fit together to make a stained glass window.
Most of Sherwood Anderson's novels and short stories are in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, HERE.
I think I have lived my entire life not really paying attention to time. I tend to think it doesn't really MATTER; what matters is the emotions you felt then and can bring to memory in your heart right now.
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