Out Damn'd Spots of Time

I got in a car accident today. I'm okay. My passengers are unharmed. And except for some minor damage, the car is fine.




I was in Berkeley going down Bancroft (a one way street) and a driver from the middle lane made a very hasty, but I guess understandable, headfirst dive across my lane to get a good parking spot near campus. Parking in that area is very challenging, so the driver got overly excited and dove across my lane without looking.









When I saw him make the move, I hit my breaks and my horn. Kept on the horn even after the contact, mostly from shock, but also a bit for spite (at least I'm honest about it!). Then I noticed the driver of the other car slink his head over in guilt and embarrassment. I felt bad for blasting him maliciously with my horn. I felt even worse when I realized the driver was about 60 years old.

I was going about 30 mph, and the other driver made his move so quickly, there really wasn't anything I could do. Or so my passengers say.

I keep playing the incident over in my mind. I hit the brakes pretty hard, but could I have smashed on them harder? If I had swerved just a few more inches, would we have avoided contact altogether? Was I driving in his blind spot for a prolonged period of time? What if I was a more defensive driver? All these scenarios replay in my head as wishful thinking that might have saved myself a deductible and certainly some hassle.

This kind of cyclical thinking reminds me of the Romantic principle of "spots of time."

Robert Barth lucidly explains that there are "two dimensions of time: [the poet's] own personal linear time and the quasi-eternal moments represented by the spots of time" (53). The linear time is time flowing in the normal, chronological fashion. The spots of time or the "quasi-eternal moments" are the moments that we constantly replay over and over in our minds—like confessing your feelings to a woman, failing a test, or crashing a car.

Barth continues to say that spots of time are "recurring experiences of natural time" and they "are crucial to [the poet] because they can offer him what his own mere chronology cannot: a sense of recurring to a locus of stable values...even in the chaos" (53). For Barth, we humans repeat these moments in our minds as a method of dealing with chaos; from a chaotic moment, the spots of time allow us to apply some stable silence to the overwhelming cacophony.

While this analysis might work for Wordsworth, in a non-Prelude setting, I find my life paralyzed by my car-accident spot of time. I've been so consumed with the cycling of the event in my mind, that my entire Friday has passed me by. I've lost the last 12 hours to "woulda, coulda, shoulda."

My dad told me to "let it go," but it's not that easy. I've grown accustomed to living in my own eternal reality, not unlike solipsism. I don't mean to be selfish and individualistic, but in moments like these, I find a masochistic comfort in reliving the harmful event. With that in mind though, I'm not sure I want to live forever in that type of negative moment. Maybe I should be more optimistic and "let it go."

Good advice, father. I guess this post will be my final exorcism. 12+ hours is long enough. After I hit "publish post": no more words about this incident.

I should be thankful that no one was hurt and that both cars are still functional. With a bit of cosmetics, I should be able to buff out this spot of time and get back to the mortal, chronological world.

It's more simple and straightforward to write that, reader, I'm upset I got in a car accident.


Works Cited:
Barth, Robert J. Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 2003.