DONE!

At first I thought the book was interesting since it was different from the rest of the books we have read so far, but as I kept reading, I found it extremely boring and basically just a ramble about his life. The first part of the book was describing his youth and how he perceived life and hoped for the future and the second part was Webster expressing his feelings about growing older and remembering his past. I am honestly thrilled that the book is over. There was a lot of repetition about how we should cherish life and become the person we want to be. Webster quotes various clichés that many people use as a guideline. The more Webster encountered, the more he learned about life.  In my opinion, the book is about how time is short and we should use the time we have to the fullest and not waste anything because we do not want any regrets. Webster learns from various events that memories serve as keys to certain events but there are some memories that will not help us in life and therefore we ignore them and to do not recall upon them. The idea that memories are our perception of a specific event is a key point that Barnes touches upon in almost every page. When Webster was still in high school with his friends, he discusses  that "history is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." I agree with this statement because in order for an event to be considered as "history" people must agree with it and it must be documented with some source of evidence. Webster also states that we do not consider events that happen right in front of us as history because we do not necessarily understand what just happened. History that has been confirmed as been studied and analyzed with an explanation as to why the event occurred. Time is uncertain and there are some events that we cannot control. Everything happens for a reason and all we have is time. Throughout the book, time is brought up again and again. To me, the main reason time is brought up so much is because we can never truly escape time even though we were the ones to create the concept of time. Back in the day, no one had a deadline of two weeks to complete a project, they worked until they finished. The concept of time as caused us to become independent on others and in a way rush what we want to do in life. When we rush, we do not get to do every single thing we wanted to do in life. Time is what holds us back. When we are little, we are told we have plenty of time to achieve our goals but once we start getting older and realizing we do not have all the time in the world, we start to regret our decisions and we start to look back on our past. Like Webster said, when we are younger we fantasize about what we would do when we are older or what we will own but we never stop to think about what we would actually be doing in the huge house we will someday own. Once you reach a certain age, you basically have accomplished so much that you have nothing more to do. Once you stop having something to do, you reflect upon what you did when you were younger and had all this time to achieve something or make a name for yourself. You start to wonder what the eight year old you would think about yourself now because you did not live up to those expectations you set up for yourself when you were younger. We have all this time yet we have no time. We want to believe we have the time in the world but in reality we do not. We want to believe we will be someone in the future and we have the time of our lives but in most cases we end up sitting in our living room thinking about the past and what we could have with our lives and if we had more time we could have done something better.