Timeheart: "What's loved, lives..."

[Nerine]

I have always had a difficulty with DD's concept of Timeheart (at least as far as I understand it.) It seems to be a place, outside of normal space and time, not subject to the laws of entropy, where things lost to the "real world" (i.e. people that have died) are preserved forever. In other words, it seems to be a sort of heaven.

Fine so far. But then I run up against something that just doesn't make sense to me: only things that are loved ("remembered affectionately" is another phrase used) are preserved in this way. Does this mean that if you're not loved, you don't go to Timeheart when you die but instead just vanish forever? That seems rather harsh...I mean, you can't really help whether people love you or not. For example, I think we'd all say that Ed "deserves" to go to Timeheart (as much as anyone deserves it) but he's only there because Nita, in the last few days of his life, happened to meet him and become friends with him. What if she hadn't met him, and something had killed him before he was "loved"? It just seems like something you have no control over.

Also, I don't like the whole idea of being preserved as others remember you. (Hate that word, "preserved" -- sounds like you're a pickled specimen in a glass jar...) Does this mean that in Timeheart you can't grow, mature, change? In a way this makes sense, because Timeheart is not subject to entropy, meaning that time does not really operate there, but it still doesn't sound quite right to me. Given instant annihilation and an eternity of boring sameness, I think I might very well choose the first. (Also, when Nita is talking to Carl in DW about what will happen after she dies in the Song, he tries to comfort her by saying, "There's always Timeheart." But if Timeheart was as I've described it above, this wouldn't be very reassuring at all.

Any ideas?

Nerine

[Birdhead]

Well... as for being "loved," I'm going to take a cop-out that, as a bright, I wouldn't normally take, and say: the One loves us all. In Holiday,, for example, Ecthanike is rather offended by the notion that the One will "redeem just anyone." I suppose this is rather like the idea of Heaven and hell in that, if you're not loved, presumably because you are either irredeemable or unwilling to be redeemed, you... don't go to Timeheart. But according to the One, everyone is redeemable.

Actually, I don't know if I agree with that myself. A slightly more secular idea is that, no matter who you are, you've been loved. Maybe only for a little bit, or only by your mother, or a pet, or... but you've still been loved. Even if only for a little bit. Maybe Ed's mother also loved him. Maybe Ed's, uhm, "victims" (for want of a better word) loved him for the swift ending of pain. on that level I suppose he did a very good job, like an anaesthetist with a slightly more final effect. (Whoops, moving towards euthanasia, not my favourite place to go. Let's go someplace else, double time.)

As for the growing... I don't know. But my guess would be that Timeheart is not a static place. it's been described as being the place where entropy is not, yes- but entropy doesn't neccesarily mean that there is no growth. It can, in this Universe, because it's imperfect.

And then remember that the Lone One is in Timeheart too- but in his Redeemed aspect. Perhpas his Redeemed aspect is entropy as it might have been meant to be in the beginning- the ability to change, without the destruction that comes of it ultimately.

And... now we're getting into the whole change without pain thing. I seem to remember, ages and ages ago, there being quite an extensive and interesting discussion on it.... *prods boards* It's probably since been deleted, curse it.

[Wiccangixie]

Based on what DD wrote, I thought of a new way to understand 'what's loved, lives....' I've come to understand that the One basically divided how things were created between the Powers and then between Wizards and other life in general. The One created everything, so in an essence everything is loved by the One. I think DD writing that line just expresses that one way or another, whether an entitiy becomes 'good' or 'bad', it was still loved at one point. That's why I think most things went to Timeheart.

Even the Lone Ones' creations ended up in Timeheart. Just look at the lotus.

[Wolf]

I've always loved the idea of TimeHeart, and when DD described it, I felt like it had always been there, and DD gave me a name for it.

I think when you're "preserved in the person's point of view" doesn't mean the whole of you, just the part of you that the person knows, remembers and loves. For example... in Nita's version of TimeHeart, her version of her mom will be different than Kit's TimeHeart, where he might be dreaming about some complicated matter, and when Nita's mom drifts in to give advice or something, her will obviously remember her differently. And when Nita and Kit are seeing someone in TimeHeart at the same time, their point of views just overlap and combine.

I'm not sure about the whole "not being loved = not being in TimeHeart" thing. I think what DD meant by this was that only good things were preserved in TimeHeart, and not things of evil. Good will live on. For example, both the cabs and the sports car were created by the LP and therefore created evil, but only the car that helped Kit out was preserved, in Kit's own little slice of TimeHeart.

As for growing... once you're in Timeheart, you're unfortunately just a memory. It kind of reminds me of the *****ive in Harry Potter... you can see the memories, you can sit right down next to them, but you cannot change things that are already set.

[araine]

I've always thought of Timeheart as something that's a lot more symbol than an actual place that humans can understand. Timeheart is supposed to be without entropy, untouched by the Lone Power. Therefore, as beings tied irrevocably into entropy, by nature we can't even begin to quantify Timeheart. Even wizards who have been there are probably unreliable narrators about what, exactly, Timeheart is.

I think that we can safely say that Timeheart stands for "what happens after we die". But I think that, even if we assume that Timeheart exists, we're not any closer to answering the question. Is it a heaven? A different universe? A different version of our own universe? Or maybe it's our own universe in a different light? Ponch has made reference to reincarnation, so maybe it's that. Is it where the Powers hang out on their days off? They, after all, live outside of Time. Is it different for all of us? After all, Nita's mother's Timeheart was different than Nita's. Is it a beginning? The end? The next step? Or maybe it's a little bit of all of these?

I don't think that we have enough data to answer these questions yet (and we probably never will), so the nature of Timeheart is both symbolic and relies heavily on personal interpretation. I have my own ideas about what Timeheart is in the YW universe, but the only thing that I am sure of is that it's probably totally different from anything that I can even attempt to describe or even try to quantify.

Which yes, I understand this kind of derails the discussion ("lol, can't be defined, bulletproof argument!!1!!"), but I think that it's still good and interesting to speculate.

What about you all?