Time-Binding

"What stories can do, I guess, is make things present." (180)

O'Brien constantly is referring to the power of his stories to make the past present, that this is in fact the very reason for stories.

"[As a writer] you take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present." (34)

"...The war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes the remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." (38)



Neil Postman's "End of Education" says that this making the past present and future present in the now is the very nature of man and words. Postman writes on Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950):

"Korzybski began his quest to discover the roots of human achievement and failure by identifying a critical functional difference between humans and other forms of life. We are, to use his phrase, "time-binders," while plants are "chemistry-binders," and animals are "space-binders." Chemistry-binding is the capacity to transform sunlight into organic chemical energy; space binding, the capacity to move about and control a physical environment. Humans have these capacities, too, but are unique in their ability to transport their experience through time. As time-binders, we can accumulate the knowledge from the past and communicate what we know to the future. Science-fiction writers need not strain invention in their search for interesting time-transporting machinery: We are the universe's time machines. Our principal means of accomplishing the binding of time is the symbol [language]."

While all stories are then binding time, O'Brien's is unique in that he recognizes the phenomenon and makes us privy to it.