In Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dream, the chapter 14 APRIL 1905 describes time as a rolling circle running the world repeatedly and endlessly. Everything that has happened in the past will happen exactly the same way in the future again and again. However, most people don’t know that their lives have repeated numerous times, and will keep repeating. Most of them think things and eventsthey have perceived and experienced in their lives took place only this time. Yet there are still few people being able to feel that their unhappy lives have taken place in the previous time.
I cut the three pieces of paper into three circles, and stringed the three panels together with a wire, so we can rotate the panels and make them turning around the wire line. It demonstrates the concept that “time runs repeatedly like a circle.”
On the biggest panel there is a series of pictures showing the same scene–a woman kissing her husband who suffers cancer. Also, on the middle penal the woman meets and marries her husband repeatedly. Last but not least, on the smallest one there are some terms commonly seen and used in people’s daily lives. These represent the concept that the same events in people’s lives are performed over and over again.
On the first two panels, the person drawn with red, yellow and orange symbolizes those few people that can feel the fact of the cycling time. They “wrestle with their bedsheets, unable to rest, stricken with the knowledge that they cannot change a single action.” And on the smallest piece of paper, I used the same color tone as the person to write the key knowledge those few people realize in the middle of the recycling lives.
