What was God doing before he made heaven and earth? … He was preparing hell for those that would pry into such profound mysteries.”
St. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI (AD 399)
“There was no ‘before’ the beginning of the universe, because once upon a time, there was no time.”
John D. Barrow, The Origin of the Universe (1994)
“Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its axis was no less arbitrary than would be say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit.”
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, pg. 100
“Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of eternity.”
Jerome K. Jerome, “Clocks,” The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1889)
“Clocks cannot tell our time of day
For what event to pray,
Because we have no time, because
We have no time until
We know what time we fill
Why time is other than time was.”
W. H. Auden, “We’re Late”
Preface
When I began working on this essay, I first established a working title, then selected five, salient quotes that I hoped would give meaning to my thoughts and words. And then? Then, I stared at the blank page, hoping for some kind of inspiration. And, I kept staring at the damned blank page, but nothing seemed to be happening. I could soon see that I was getting nowhere fast and instead of just buckling down and accomplishing something, I was doing no more than simply killing time.
Since I’ve been retired, I certainly have time on my side — as well as time on my hands — but then again I realized that I was acting as if I actually had all the time in the world. And when you’re my age, you always have that feeling anyway that, little by little, time is slipping away. So, perhaps I might not want to be so cavalier about it and wake up some day (or not) to find out that I’ve literally run out of time. And, even though for so many people time is money, I’m pretty much doing everything pro bono these days, so I can’t say that anyone is paying me to do anything for anybody anymore.
They say that time flies when you’re having a good time. But, here time was moving quite quickly and not only was I not whiling away my time in an enjoyable pursuit, but I definitely wasn’t having the time of my life either. Then, as luck, happenstance and synchronicity would have it, I glanced over to the wall of books in my library, and a long-forgotten volume literally jumped out at me: The Story of Time. Re-reading large swaths of this suddenly-rediscovered book (which has been in my personal collection for over 20 years) supplied a jumping off point for my essay.
It was fortunate that this invaluable compendium of all-things-time emerged rather fortuitously to serve as a necessary catalyst for me. I fear that if I had spent much longer staring at that cursed blank page, I indeed would have turned into some poor man’s version of Father Time. And, I don’t care who you are, time and tide wait for no man. Before I ramble on for much longer, jeopardize our writer/reader relationship and overstay my welcome — I think it’d be wise for me to segue (just in the nick of time, perhaps) into my essay. In closing, that concludes my introductory thoughts — at least for the time being…
Time. Where to start? As huge and unwieldy a topic as exists. With so many descriptions and explanations attributed to it over the ages, and addressed by some of the worlds greatest thinkers. What more can I — obviously not on the list of world’s great thinkers — hope to contribute to the discussion? Maybe, if I’m modestly successful, it would be what any serious and thoughtful person could hope to offer: a fresh perspective and a slightly different point of view, based on individual life experience, education and personal biases. And, with luck, to perhaps add even a modicum of insight or understanding to the constantly-renewing data base of knowledge. Sounds like a lofty enterprise. But, if you don’t aim high, well, you know. So, a major quest from a minor figure like myself, right? But, I’ll give it a go; you know that I will.
Let me now go back to The Story of Time — a wonderful source on the subject. The opening chapter was written by the late Umberto Eco, the brilliant medievalist, philosopher and novelist. He lays out an instructive chronology of how wise men back to Aristotle have advanced various interpretations and understandings of the concept of time.
That original quote that I began with from Augustine — saint, bishop, theologian and philosopher — was intended as a joke of sorts by the great man himself. In essence, Augustine was already close to the same idea of time that “big bang” theorists of today would readily support; as Eco stated: “that time was born at a precise moment; that only from the ‘big bang’ onwards does it make sense to talk of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’; and that it is nonsense to ask what was happening ‘before’ the birth of time.”
The “history” of time is replete with many milestones and key events. Breakthroughs in both the understanding of time, as well as in the creation of instruments used to tell time — and to track it ever more accurately. While these “facts” about time are important for an overall understanding of its evolution and utilization down though history, what really interests me about the topic (and, I hope, you as well) are the more abstract and nuanced interpretations of time — those that involve psychological and philosophical considerations. But, before moving on to that, I’d like to briefly review with you how we got to this point, and put it in an historical context:
• Aristotle: “Time is the calculable measure of motion with respect to before and after-ness.”
• John Locke, 17th century English philosopher: “Time is any constant periodical appearance of ideas; order and succession.”
• “If time was conceived as the precise measure of an ordered succession of states, it should come as no surprise to find that its first criterion of measurement in every known civilization should have been the movement of the stars”. (Umberto Eco)
• For many centuries, humans could measure out the years, months and days, but it took a long time before they were able to measure hours and minutes.
• “Among primitive peoples, the notion that the year has any particular length or duration is generally lacking. The seasons recur and there may be a word for the cycle of recurring seasons which we can translate as a ‘year’. (W. H. Auden)
• Galileo’s investigations into the swinging pendulum during the 1640s led him to believe that the pendulum could theoretically be used as a clock. But, it was Christian Huygens, a Dutch physicist, who actually invented the very first working pendulum clock in 1656.
• The first portable, pocket-sized watch had been invented by German locksmith Peter Henlein. The name “watch” came from sailors who used them to replace hourglasses they had been using to time their four-hour shifts of duty, or “watches”. The name stuck.
• “As long as a watch remains detached from the network, lacking a radio receiver for automatic updates… navigators could only guess at their longitude. To know the time in Greenwich, England, was to know one’s place at sea.” (Noted science writer James Gleick)
• By the end of the nineteenth century, the networking of “telegraph lines, telephone wires into homes and businesses, and then invisible broadcasts of radio signals… meant synchronization. The single piece of information transmitted more than any other was the time — a ‘standard time.’” (Gleick)
• The sprawling United States in that era was: “a country of a thousand local times. Railroads changed that. Railroads demanded punctuality — they forced people to be ‘on time’.” (Gleick)
• “The fastest time is real time … (which) began with the birth of computers. But computers did not create real time. Computers created fake time — simulated time in simulated realities. As they gained speed, the simulations began to catch up here and there with their real- world counterparts.” (Gleick)
So, to me the aforementioned highlights are the nuts and bolts of time down through the ages. But, having covered this ground, I’d like to go beyond the basics of fact, history and significant events and consider how humans perceive time and its nuances, both in philosophical and psychological terms. For instance, serious thinkers throughout history have worked hard to define the terms “past”, “present”, and “future” — and, the relationship that they have with each other. Augustine had written that even though we can measure time, “we can’t measure the past nor the future.”
As Eco writes:
“...time is a strange phenomenon in which everything future follows on from the past, and both past and future flow out from the present. And yet, Augustine asks himself, how can past and future exist if the past is no longer and the future not yet?”
Augustine questioned whether it meant that we were left with an eternal present. Eco goes on:
“...even if we take the present alone, can we say that the current month is present, when a day, an hour, a minute, a second are the only real present parts of it? As soon as he tries to pin down the duration of the present second, however, Augustine realizes that even that second can be infinitesimally subdivided into even shorter entities, and that even were the briefest of all possible units of time conceivable, it would pass so quickly from the future to the past that it would have no duration at all.”
How, in fact, does the present relate to both the past and the future? The great German novelist and essayist, W.G. Sebald, proposed that “all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously — past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment we think of them.” He stated that “time has stood still and the years behind us were still to come.” He obviously feels the same way about future events that he does of the past:
“It seems to me as if all moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last.”
Further, Sebald cites the celebrated Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges with this suggestion:
“The future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as a memory.”
But always, the discussion would get back to the quickly changing status of the past, the present and the future. First, William James:
“Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to the present moment of time, one of the most baffling experiences occurs, where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”
John Banville, the Irish novelist, gives it a try:
“That is why the past is such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that.”
Author Robert Pirsig is one who obviously considers the present as perhaps the most important of the categories of time. To him, it is “the leading edge”, and that is where: “all of the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?”
He continues:
“The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.”
So perhaps Pirsig believes in an “eternal present” of some kind, harkening back to Augustine’s similar consideration. Coming at it from another angle, the brilliant scientist Stephen Hawking stated that “the laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the present.” So, while events and eras change, the immutable laws of science don’t.
I’m quite sure that the debate about past, present and future, will continue into the future as it did in the past. And, I’m fairly certain that there are some philosophers out there right now who are thinking about it in the present. But, what intrigues me the most about any discussion involving time is a consideration of “relative time.” We know that after Einstein, time and space were no longer considered absolutes, but were subject to external forces. Eco notes that the term “relative time” has
“leaked into a number of other disciplines. Psychologists, for example, might use the term to describe how and why different people seem to perceive certain phenomena such as the passage of time in different ways.”
Eco continues:
“We assume that the time we carry on our wrists is the only time that is ‘real’. But, as one has seen, time is infinitely relative. Each person’s understanding of time is both psychologically and culturally conditioned. For, despite the acts of the International Meridian Conference of 1884, time itself cannot be zoned. The face of a clock may proclaim one truth, but an hour in New York is not the same as an hour in Tahiti and an hour in purgatory is not the same as an hour in paradise.”
As we navigate our way through life — through the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the decades —we know on an intellectual level that “time” is passing. However, it’s not usually something that we keep track of or monitor closely on a continuing basis. Marcel Proust, the French novelist, explained it this way:
“In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.”
During the moments when we do pay attention to the passage of time in our lives, there can be a tendency to want to put the brakes on, to slow it down, to savor the moments that much more — and, in so doing, perhaps, in some way, to extend our lives. There was a 1960’s Broadway musical, “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” Perhaps, in terms of our discussion here, the more appropriate phrase might be: “Stop the World, I Don’t Want to Get Off… Yet.” The following poem, by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, considers the passage of time in a way similar to Proust. But, it goes a step further in wanting to somehow find a way to indeed slow it down, if not outright bring it to a halt:
Time is a very strange thing.
So long as one takes it for granted, it is nothing at all. But then, all of a sudden, one is aware of nothing else. It is all about us, it is within us also.
In our face it is there, trickling.
In the mirror it is there, trickling.
In my sleep it is there, flowing.
And between me and you.
There too, it flows, soundless, like an hour-glass.
Oh, Quinquin, sometimes I hear it flowing Irresistibly on.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night
And stop the clocks, all, all of them.
But, to that inclination, Maya Angelou would say:
“Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence — neither speed it up or slow down, add to nor diminish — it is an imponderably valuable gift.”
As Augustine wrote, even though we can’t measure the past, present or future, we can measure time:
“...whenever we say that a certain time is long, that it never seems to pass or that it has passed by very quickly. In other words there is a non-metric measure, the sort we use when we think of the day as being boring and long or when a pleasurable hour has gone by too swiftly.” (Eco)
On a personal level, every creature on the planet will experience an “individual end of time”. As Eco stated: “As birth begins the human clock, death ends it.” Yet, most of us believe that there is something beyond our earthly existence. I would suggest that one way we might outlive our death is by what we’ve contributed during our life. Hopefully, we’ve made good use of our time on the planet by making some kind of difference in the lives of family, friends and acquaintances. Personally, I think that’s the best (non-religious) shot we have for “life after death’ — by continuing to be “alive” in the positive, timeless memories of others.
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Afterword
Whew! I was really beginning to think that I’d never actually complete this essay. And, that this particular effort might just be a big waste of time. Having already published ten essays on my blog, I felt that if I selected a promising topic, put in some quality time and worked diligently, that I would end up with a well-written piece of which I could be proud. If I don’t mind saying so, that formula has seemed to work for me time and time again.
But, as I initially expressed in the preface, this current piece has really challenged me and given me quite a hard time. I had pretty much gotten used to putting these essays together in my spare time, in my down time — literally, it seemed to me, in no time at all! But, I’ve put in so much overtime on this project that at a certain point, I began to wonder if this was time well spent. It wasn’t. I swear that if I was paid five cents a word, or $5.00 per hour, maybe even at time and a half, I could retire a rich man. (Actually, I am retired, but still not a rich man.)
No matter how inspiring and worthwhile the endeavor, things need to have a time limit attached to them. There must be efficient time management. You can’t just cavalierly say that it will get done when it gets done. No! It’s not okay to tell those waiting on you that it will most likely get done in good time. If you can’t stand the heat, then the kitchen is no place for you. In other words, if you’re not able to perform in crunch time, then you’re probably not ready for prime time —and, ultimately, there will be no harvest time of which to speak.
Once upon a time (actually, just last month), I wouldn’t have believed that I’d encounter this difficult a time. If there had been a time lapse video of me working on this piece at my desk, it would not come off looking like art being made, but more like a Keystone Komedy in the works — lots of fits and starts, minor cursing (okay, major), with a dash of bumbling ineptitude thrown in.
Throughout this tediously long journey, I was giving myself conflicting advice. I’d hear this inner voice telling me: “Take your time, Frank, take your time. But, hurry up and be done with it, would you.” Ultimately, after much perseverance and time-consuming effort, I am done! And, I’d say it’s about time, don’t you think? Now’s probably the right moment to admit what I’ve known all along: It was just a matter of time.
Resonance 