The Last Word On Nothing

I recently bought a camera that prints pictures immediately upon exposing them. Remember those? It’s pretty fun, and it’s nice if, like me, you take a lot of pictures and then save them in your iCloud and forget to look at them. Or at least forget until your phone sends you an automated “memory,” and then they cause a catch in your throat when you realize that was two years ago? How?

Anyway I got it on Amazon, where I get too many things (I think I need an intervention) and that meant it was a good deal, and that it came with a whole kit of extras. There were stickers and cheap plastic frames and tiny clothespins on a string and a little photo album. The instructions were in badly translated Japanese (it’s a Fujifilm). But the album is what got my attention. 

It’s emblazoned with a seemingly random set of numbers, which either signify nothing or something momentous:

140 | 110 | 033 | 072

?? I mean, what? What the heck is this supposed to mean? Also, beneath the numbers reads the caption PIECES OF MOMENT. 

It took me a couple minutes to stop laughing, and when I did I decided to put the album aside and test the camera on my dog and my daughter. The first snapshots were a little dark, but I kept testing with different exposure settings and I got better. It’s so much fun to take a snapshot, listen to the mechanical whirr—such a comforting analog sound—and wait a couple minutes to see how it turns out.

The results are tangible in a way that quickly becomes addictive. You take a picture, and then you have a picture. I really love this one photo of my daughter and my dog, both so young and vibrant, both all legs, both sticking their tongues out. I also love one of my daughter and me in front of a Moon backdrop I duct taped to our garage for an Apollo landing party. Little physical reminders of a memory. It struck me: They really are PIECES OF MOMENT.

What an awkward phrase, but with such depth. Everything is a piece of a moment, isn’t it? Every Instagram story, every Instax snapshot, every dumb tweet, every bit of your very memory. Nothing is preserved just as it was; everything is just a piece of a moment. Suddenly my badly translated photo album wasn’t very funny.

I started noticing the pieces of moments all around me — the physical evidence of a thing happening, a moment passing. I walked the dog one morning and we came across a piece of a robin’s wing, just sitting there on the sidewalk like a fallen leaf, but smaller and much sadder. A piece of a particularly violent moment. A violent moment maybe (probably) involving a neighborhood cat. 

We kept walking. I saw some road trash, and my dog lunged for it. It was a wrapper from White Castle. A piece of a moment between friends, maybe. Or maybe a remnant from a moment of hurry. Did someone stop at the fast food place on their way to the hospital down our street? The wrapper was all that remained of whatever moment transpired, between multiple people or between a person and their thoughts, happy or grim. Either way I’ll never know.

One of my friends has this beautiful line of thought about fossils. One time he came across dinosaur footprints in the ancient, now-fossilized sands of a long-buried Earth. They are a physical manifestation of the presence of a creature, a real being that breathed and ate and lived out its life in a time and a land unimaginably distant from our own, but on this planet all the same. The day it walked on that beach and made that footprint was a real day, with a blue sky just like the one above me today. And the dinosaur was not walking alone. There were multiple footprints. Maybe it was walking with its family. As he puts it, the moment the dinosaur stepped in the wet sand was a real moment, as urgent and as saturated with life and promise and hope as this one. The fossils represent just one piece of that. 

In the end these pieces are all we’ve got. Memory is imperfect and imprecise. We can never relive our experience, nor can we go back in time. But pieces of moment are a gift we can give ourselves.

Image credit: Top image by Kārlis Dambrāns via Wikimedia Commons; inset by the author