Make the world last twenty minutes

Duration: 21 minutes
Props: a world and a watch
Effect: terrifying and reassuring



The past clings on. It is present in the smallest actions. It coils itself around our thoughts, even in those that seem unconcerned with it. The future also ceaselessly sustains the smallest of our projects. It accompanies our slightest expectation.
What would happen if we tried to rid ourselves – in a spirit of illusion of play – of these terrible constraints? Imagine therefore, as far as it is possible to do so, that the past never happened and the future does not exist. Let us believe that the world, this world, lasts only twenty minutes. It was created from nothing, just an instant ago, as it is, and us with it. One minute earlier, it did not exist. Everything the world currently contains by way of relics, ancient ruins, libraries, monuments, archives, distant or recent memories – the whole lot – has just materialized, at the same instant. The archives are there all right, as are the witnesses to a past, but the past they speak of never existed – until a moment ago.
This world – infinite, diverse, multiple – has a life expectancy of exactly twenty minutes. Beyond which time it will disappear completely and definitively. Not in some gigantic conflagration, or cosmic explosion. Not in some terrific fire or furnace. Just a brusque extinction. Like a soap-bubble bursting, or a light going out.
Make yourself at home in this twenty-minute world. Remark the extent to which it is, in a sense, identical to our own: same dimensions, same skies. No object is any different. The same people are doing the same things. And yet: it is not at all the same universe. A world which lacks the depth of a real past and the perspective of a viable future may certainly seem completely identical, but it still differs radically from our own, due to this time limit. Before this ephemeral universe has completely disappeared, try hard to understand – you who were under the illusion that another reality existed and will exist – to what extent your thought process is habitually different from this existence which is even now counting down. The more you experience this contrast and this distance, the more you will feel the importance, for us, of an immemorial past and a distant future.
As the fatal twenty minutes approaches its term, you should feel, furtively, the dumb terror that everything will, effectively, disappear.
Most likely this will not happen. You can then emerge, at the twenty-first minute, from this objectless terror. Now concentrate on savouring your relief that the world goes on.
Later you might feel, like an after-taste, a secret disappointment that nothing was obliterated.
Bad loser…