Размышления над смоляной бочкой

82The present moment is the most important moment in your life. Especially if it’s your last frigging moment. Then it is your frigging life. Laden with the past, pregnant with the future. It is eternal and infinite. Time is not like a river, no matter what any-one says. It is more of a lake, or a puddle, a scoop of water trapped in the bottom of a tar-barrel. Your birth is an event, like a pebble falling on the surface of the pool, and it sets up a sequence of ripples circling outwards and outwards. Looking down on the rip-ples you can observe the whole pattern at once, from the centre to the outer circle. Have you ever noticed that?This idea does not come to me now, spontaneously, at this highly significant moment of my frigging life. Not at all. It was an idea that came to me many years ago. I was about sixteen, when William Flately commit-ted suicide by ducking himself head first into a rain-water barrel. A con-verted tar-barrel, you know the type. I knew Billy Flately. He was a quiet man who went about his business and was polite to everyone, and apart from being polite to everyone, he kept himself to himself, as everyone said and repeated afterwards. I was shocked. My father’s death had cast a shadow about me, of course, and I had brooded on it ceaselessly, but the event itself had happened totally unknown to me. Understanding its significance was something that came to me only afterwards and gradually. It was different with Billy Flately. He was the first person that I was aware of actually com-mitting suicide. I was also fascinated. How could a grown man manage to drown himself in a water barrel? Of course officially, it was an accident: the poor man slipped while he was retrieving something from the bottom of the barrel. Therefore he could be buried in the cemetery beside his m...