Editors Choice Haiku

WHR June 2016

Editor’s Choice

antique shop

browsing in search

for lost time

Cesar Ciobika

Yes, time! The age-old theme. À la recherche du temps perdu …Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust needed a vast number of pages to write about it. Cesar needs only eight words in three lines to do the same. One thinks of us humans being caught by the Newtonian time. What I call the Indian Time might be the mother time of all times. Clocks can lose time. We only waste it. With tide it waits for no man. Time is relentless. Time is indifferent. But time is also a healer. Time can sometimes solve problems for us, too. We can readily answer if someone asks what time is it now, by looking at our watch or clock. However, we haven’t got a foggest idea if he asks what is time.

The definition of ‘antique’ is as vague as that of ‘classic’. In Latin, it just means “ancient”. We often use it when we think something is very old. A rough guide in my art historian days in Britain, covering a wide-ranging areas including antique, was “any objects more than one hundred years old of monetary and aesthetic value”. So, I was writing about anything from the treasures of Assyria or ancient China to the Victorian monstrocity. Whatever it is, it is a concrete and specific physical thing which reminds us of the past. Scientifically, it is part of the concept of the Newtonian time, though its time never gains or loses but just passes incessantly and continually.

If there are no gains or losses in the Newtonian time, ‘lost time’ is that which you and I would feel as if we have lost. Therefore, it is a far more complicated time horizon, involving not only the physical time but also emotional, personal, psychological and imaginary or imaginative factors.

Why do we keep things? Apart from necessities such as a bread knife or bedlinen, we keep them for their cultural or sentimental values, for possible monetary appreciation, for status symbol, or simply for satisfying our greedy and insatiable possessiveness. Some people would increase their possessions in order to ease their stresses and anxieties. Others would keep some objects as a relic of the loved one they have lost either by death, by becoming a missing person, or by lost love. Others, presumably like Cesar, would wish to regain knowledge, understanding and appreciation of a particular bygone period(s) of time, such as the Ukiyoe floating world of the Edo Japan, or the Dickensian England.

Whatever lost time Cesar was searching for, his conduct or thought behind it is symbolic of all of us humans and therefore is universal and ‘timeless’. This cannot be anything other than a great haiku. Many congratulations!