Analysis Of Accidental Time And The Pedestrian

Octavio Paz’s “Identical Time” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” have, in common, a theme of aliveness. They each feature certain individuals as particularly alive in their cities: the old man is alive in the busy dawn of Paz’s Mexico City, and Mr. Mead is alive in the silent night of a future Los Angeles envisioned by Bradbury. The individuals’ aliveness manifests as stillness in “Identical Time” and motion in “The Pedestrian” against the urban backgrounds - signifying, in both, living a human life freely, in the present and nature. Furthermore, in portraying the urban backgrounds as, in contrast to the individuals, dull and lifeless, the two pieces speak together to how cities may diminish and hinder our aliveness and humanity. In “Identical
The cars that “flare up and burn out and flare up” as the speaker watches them go by with his eyes closed - a fact that indicates the symbolic nature of the imagery - is precisely a metaphor for the movement of the city, one with explosive speed and fiery intensity (Paz 1). A drastically different image, however, is presented right beneath in stanza 2: “On a bench an old man talks to himself” (Paz 1). The nameless person, referred to plainly as “an old man,” is implied to be less lively than his surroundings, the city portrayed earlier, because of his advanced years. In fact, he is simply sitting “on a bench,” immobile, in contrast to the movement of the city and its cars. The fact that he “talks to himself,” instead of interacting with others in a city of millions where, in contrast, just around him “a couple embraces by an iron railing / she laughs and asks something,” conveys a sense of idleness (Paz 1). However, despite the fact that the old man is still - immobile and inanimate - in opposition to the vibrant Mexico City in which he
The poem conveys the notion of “present” through the motifs of time and stillness: “There is another time within time / still… / without past or future / only alive / like the old man on the bench / indivisible identical perpetual,” says the speaker near the end of the poem (Paz 6). The “another time within time” that is “identical,” which the title of the poem, “Identical Time,” alludes to, is “still” and “identical” because it is “without past or future,” the transient states of the conventional perception of time. Instead, this other time is the present (since it is what’s other than the past and future), and it is by virtue of its stillness - the expression of aliveness in the poem - “alive.” Furthermore, the speaker, in regard to the present, reflects, “Perhaps time doesn’t pass / images of time pass / and if the hours do not come back / presences come back” (Paz 5). He thinks that the time that “doesn’t pass,” the present, is, in fact, the real and true time which always “come[s] back” to him and is always with him, while the common perceptions of passing time are “images,” fabrications by the minds of others that “do not come back” and are out of their control. Hence, to be alive means, in the poem, to live in the present, that which is alive, real, and controllable. Indeed, the old man’s aliveness stems from the fact he lives in the present,