SMART TALK

by Dr. Viva Palaver

ALWAYS AND FOREVER: Therapists tell me here at the Center for English as a First Language that patients share an almost universal problem with terms for time. This fascinates me as the center's psychologist.

The therapists tend to treat the problem with logic: always and forever each expresses temporal infinity. Therefore, they're absolute terms, allowing neither addition nor subtraction. Always and forever means infinity times two, which simply makes no sense.

They make the same argument against forever and ever, which is to say that merely forever is somehow too short.

For all eternity invites sarcastic questions from therapists such as Dr. Weiss N. Heimer, who quite logically asks, "All eternity?" So how long is just half of eternity? If I try to be good, can I be punished for maybe ten percent of eternity? How long might that be, exactly?"

Sarcastic or not, logic doesn't always get through to patients. Some need to see me to work through very basic concepts of time, life spans, and history. Sometimes, a fear of death gets in their way. They me still cling to their early childhood belief that forever means ever since their birth, and that time obligingly ceases upon their death, which will probably never happen.

Once we get past their denial of this fact of life, patients see the deeper meaning of always and stop sounding redundant about it.

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