Out of time
Frank Truman. This is the name of a
man that believes only in the senses. He lives in a place called Iludia and is always in arguing with his neighbors about some ideas he has in respect some common issues.
Almost all consider him eccentric, short from a complete idiot. His main signal of dementia is the conviction he has of time as a nonexistent fact. That is the general assessment of other towards him. Although he is considered a fool, he managed to achieve enough money to think about useless things, like the existence of time. Those few that permit themselves some conversation with Frank, try to opose arguments against his strange idea.
They used to show him the
clocks as evidence of time existence. Others
point to the faces of old man, like them, that seem to be like landscapes sculpted by the time elapsing. Frank, with all the patience he can gather, responds that clocks are just machines that perform movements and nobody can point him where he can find the time in a clock. Adding to that point, if time is one why each clock shows a different mesaure of it? Other puzzle is to explain the following question: if there are no clocks or movements, or any kind of change is it possible that time continues to exist? Nobody in Iludia answer those demands, even though that questions are more or less easy to understand.
One of Frank friends, who consider him not crazy but just a thoroughly romantic, urges him to come down to earth and enjoy things, instead of searching for nonsense problems. Rather than enjoy life like anyone else, Frank loves to use his mind as detective. But his pleasure is not detect criminals, instead he tries to detect the real substance of things. Besides that weird behavior, Frank has a new problem now that he is an aged man. Some members of his
family want to put hands on his possessions, and envisioned a way to do so by declaring him incapable of managing the family wealth. A lawyer is contracted to write a petition asking for an interdiction of Frank and to send him to mental treatment. A judge
decided in the family interest and Frank is sent to a clinic to review his ideas about the real world. Without money and with enough time to regret being so true during his entire life, Frank passed some weeks there, in the company of some other insane people and doing the same he used to do between normal people. Thinking. Although he actually don’t regret his thoughts, he either like to be a guest of a psychiatric clinic, so he decided to forget, in apparency, the way he thinks about the world. Like Galileo in face of inquisition, he abjured his former ideas in front of doctors, family and the community he lived in. Now, returning to the streets and social contact he is not anymore expressing his doubts in subjects like time and other sacred issues. He talks over women, sports and
gossip about the life in his community. He is now a normal and productive person in his town.
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