Sorry you can’t unmelt time

Last summer I went to an exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I highly recommend going there, most of the exhibits are temporary, and incredibly odd, making them memorable. There was one in particular that caught my attention called, Standing Julian, made by Urs Fischer, An eight-foot tall wax figure of a man, cowering over observers as they walked through the exhibit. What some, but not all, noticed was that the man was literally being destroyed as we observed… Inside the man’s head was a very small candle burning, melting the wax man before our eyes. It is one thing to say that nothing is permanent, but to see a certain beauty being destroyed and realizing that if you visited the museum in two weeks the statue would be only feet… that is an entirely different topic of impermanence. Time never stops, and we cross paths with things as time is moving, what those things were five minutes before interacting with them, we will never know. People who have seen the statue will talk about it to friends, recommending the exhibit, but those friends will never see the same wax man that the people recommended visiting. No one sees things in the same way or in the same moment of time because a moment is just a fraction of a second that can never be recovered.