A Strange Thing, Time.

"None of these people, I realised, could cope with reality any better than I could. My father's death had a nasty finality to it, and it made a mockery of the laws they lived by: that every fact can be reinterpreted, that every ending can be changed. Dickens had rewritten Great Expectations so that Pig could be happy. No one could rewrite this."
-The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

I love the way the author had penned this down. This is the point of view of a child whose father's life had been ripped away in a car crash, the same one which landed him in hospital, surrounded by strange men and women, his father's colleagues, in a blurry grey of movement. This is a child who has grown up with books, scholarly articles on the Roman Renaissance, the son of a book seller. Having grown up in a world of scratched ink on parchment, he realises that the ones whose steps he is retracing all share the same sentiment, the same prejudice against reality. Reality doesn't follow a dramatic plot that can be twisted and tweaked into a literary masterpiece. They indulge themselves in the world of written words, they grow to believe that fate can be rewritten, tear the page out and throw it in the fire, put the pen to the page and new sensations can be experienced. But reality just doesn't work that way. There's a reason I quoted this part of the book, and it's because I believe it's something I can learn from. Every passing second is a moment passed, and every moment passed is embedded in finality. We can chisel and tear away at its edges, but that will only cost time, more time encrusted in the raw truth that we are closer and closer to time's up.

"A strange thing, time. It weighs most on those who have it least."
-The Rule of Four