The 20 minute lifetime

So as I was reading The Four Quartets I came across a passage that reminded me of a 20 minute lifetime. It goes "You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here. When the train starts, and the passengers are settled To fruit, perioficals, and the passengers are settled (and those who saw them off have left the platform) Their faces relax from grief into relief, To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours. Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who have left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus," (41)
This made me think of a twenty minute lifetime because it is as if these people are on a time traveling train, experiencing a new life that will seem like a lifetime, but is in actuality only a mere couple of hours. They will be taken away to experience something new and will end up at the next station the same people with this new lifetime experience in their mind.

Studying all these different experiences of twenty minute lifetimes makes me wish that I too had a story to tell of another life within my current life, but sadly I do not. The closest I believe that I have come to having such an experience is in my dreams, most of which I can never remember. I am still crossing my fingers, though, that one day in the near future I will be able to retell a twenty minute lifetime experience of my own.