” The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
John Banville, The Sea
There are little moments of gleeful awakening in every part of us left behind sometimes hidden in a precious little box.
The secret of the New Year according to the narrator’s father lay hidden in little time capsules he created, he believed would be revealed to the narrator in posterity.
These capsules contained videos, photographs and objects the narrator believed were lost in the ravages of time. These capsules now offer the narrator a rare opportunity of traveling back through time while experiencing his several magnificent flights and agonising plummets. Perhaps they contain certain precious stories that he has forgotten, certain gestures perhaps that cause him to sigh and certain moments he has looked past.
Perhaps the photographs, the videos, the objects contain a magic spell that would liberate the soul of the narrator towards uninhibited euphoria from the brutal pangs of age and wisdom.
The story expresses the magnitude of the gestures made by the narrator’s father. His efforts would lead the narrator towards unearthing a number of stories to the world that would have remained otherwise untold. stories that are necessary for a world that is indifferent without guilt or remorse.
Stories that could rekindle the innocuous urge in mankind to find solace in beauty, the moments of one’s childhood wrapped around the various alleys of nostalgia.
The secret is to discover the mirth that is evidently rare, on the verge of total disappearance.
The narrator’s father in an attempt to capture lost time like Marcel Proust creates a myriad of memories for the narrator in the movie. Memories that are either forgotten or looked past. Each memory adds something new to the stories about the past. In the process, every new year is given the opportunity of performing the task of double creation. The first being the linear function of picturing a future and the other being the function of reshaping the past.
The snippets, the photographs, the videos in the form of vignettes act as a profound creator that would ensure immortality for both the father and the son. The attempt is to create a domain where nothing is lost forever.
The narrator’s attempt to bring back moments of glee, laughter and trivialities make him a conjurer of sorts. He tries to break the linearity of time to create a place of perpetual existence through visions secretly captured by a person who dared to believe that death can be outdone if one were dexterous and who believed in the capacity of art to defy inevitability.
