When the Pope visited the United States, the official
welcoming band played Hello, Dolly! Since the music was
properly rendered and Papal protocol properly observed, no
one found the situation amusing or incongruous. I think
only surrealists would have seen these patterns joined in
time and insisted that the world of interpenetrating spaces
and all-contemporaneous time was the real reality. The
world of Magritte and Ernst is no longer a private world: it
is now our world.

Today we live simultaneously in different communities
of time, or more than this, in different personalities of
time. An ancient Jack Benny recently appeared on the Dick
Cavett Show where he was shown watching a movie of an
elderly Jack Benny in pajamas watching a young Jack
Benny on TV making love to Dorothy Lamour in an old
movie: a world within a world within a world.

As a boy, I spent my summers beside a lake. Around
1930 an uncle set up a movie camera in a favorite glade,
pointing the camera through the trees, past the shore
toward a distant island, and filmed children playing and
adults picnicking. Years later he set up a projector exactly
where the camera tripod had been, pointing it toward the
island, so that on the screen we saw exactly what we would
have seen had it been daylight, save one difference:

everyone was twenty years older and some were dead. The
audience became strangely silent and several quietly left.

—Edmund Carpenter