Soul of the World (12 page)

I take the coffee upstairs to my study and turn on my computer. My computer requires a minute and a half just to load the desktop icons. I log on to my email account and read my new messages. This takes ten minutes, usually. If I have to respond immediately to an email, I’m there longer. I look up at the clock: it’s 10:07. I finish my coffee and go to the bathroom to blow-dry my hair and brush my teeth. Five minutes there, now it’s 10:12. If I had to leave now for an appointment, I’d go downstairs, gather my keys, wallet, cellphone and whatever else I needed and head out. That takes another four minutes. By 10:17 I’d be in the garage and putting my things in the car before opening up the garage door (it’s manual), moving the car out of the garage and then reclosing the door. It would now be 10:21. A record. One phone call, a complicated email, and that departure time could easily be pushed to 10:41.

On a good morning I can begin work in my study at 11:00, and on an interrupted morning, by 11:45. On the days I’m not teaching I work for four hours in the afternoon—though, if I have any errands to do (grocery shopping, bookstore visits, research), I try to leave the house by 1:30 p.m. to get a few things done before rush hour, which starts at 3:00 p.m. and can add as much as an hour to any trip. “Take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves,” Lord Chesterfield said. But the fact remains, given my morning routine, I really can only trim a few minutes off here and there.

I have a self-winding dress watch that I wear for formal occasions. It will run for a few days after I take it off, but it has almost always stopped by the time I put it on again. There is a little magnifying lens built into the crystal that enlarges the tiny date window. The date is usually a week or two behind. To advance it by a single day I have to pull out the crown and twirl the hour and minute hands through an entire twenty-four-hour cycle. If the watch is one or two weeks behind, twirling the crown is a laborious, finger-cramping exercise. But I don’t find it tedious. I use it as a memory test. In my mind’s eye I go through all those days and hours, visualizing what I was doing at 2:00 p.m., then 3:00, then 4:00 p.m. and so on, right through each day in succession.

Because of my familiarity with fast-forwarding DVDs, the exercise is not only easy, it’s also kind of fun. I see myself rocketing out of bed, dashing around the house and leaping out the door and into my car. My drive to the university is more like the Grand Prix. I teach frantically, gesturing and pacing like someone on amphetamines, then zoom downtown to meet my hyper-animated friends for a frenzied restaurant dinner. After speeding home I sit fidgeting in front of the television for a few seconds, then race to the bathroom, run down the hall and bound into bed, lights out. I thrash around under the covers for a while, then the windows brighten and I’m up again to repeat the process.

D
OING
T
IME

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

—
Oscar Wilde

Although most of us don’t share Wilde’s particular anguish, we are all prisoners of time, sentenced by the necessities of life and urban congestion. The difference is that we don’t serve our sentences consecutively but in small portions. In a lifetime the average North American spends over nine months commuting, two years shopping and two more years cooking and washing up. Twenty-seven years are given over to sleeping, four years to eating, and twenty to working. Five months are spent talking on the phone, which pales beside the five and a half years spent watching television. Three long months are wasted waiting for someone. But it isn’t all tedium. Given a fifty-five-year-long active sex life, the average person will spend four blissful months having sex.

One of the obvious ways of gaining more time, of slowing down the speed of the world around us, is to squeeze more time out of the hours we have. If you can do in five minutes something that takes others ten minutes, you prevail, you get there faster. Nowhere is that more apparent than in sports, particularly at the Olympic level. The difference between gold and silver can be measured in hundredths of a second, though at such infinitesimal increments it seems to me that our ability to measure small amounts of time has become an abstract, cruel taskmaster, extracting winners and losers from almost equal performances. All athletes excel at doing something fast, and their complex physical accomplishments are the result of a special kind of intelligence.

For sports, music and any activity that requires the co-ordination of hundreds of muscles, our brains have a clever assistant called the cerebellum. A knot of grey matter located at the back of the brain, the cerebellum is dedicated solely to storing the memories of complex movements. We train our cerebellum when, for instance, we learn to walk, ride a bicycle or play arpeggios on the piano. The cerebellum allows us to do things that call for lightning-fast reflexes, by re-enacting the exact sequences unconsciously. Playing an arpeggio on the piano, one of the most complex and quick of all human achievements, involves a series of finger motions well beyond the normal human reaction time of .02 seconds, but it’s possible because all the fingering sequences are preloaded, as it were, in the cerebellum.

Yet our mind, the cortex, has no such accomplice. We may be able to train ourselves to think more quickly and clearly, but there are limits to what we can fit into a week. For most of us, just juggling our careers and lives is so complicated and demanding that if we can muddle through a day, no less a year, we feel as if we’ve accomplished something. To try to speed up my day, I recently consulted a free website on time management. It told me—not surprisingly—to prioritize. I should organize all my tasks into four categories: important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important but urgent, and not important and not urgent.

The key, the site suggested, was to learn to say no to tasks in the last two categories in order to free up more time for tasks in the first two. But I’m a master of deferral. It’s like the oldjoke, “I’ve got a procrastination problem that, one day, I’m going to do something about.” Pinned to my cork bulletin board in the kitchen is a list of household jobs that has been posted there for years. The top three are: repair the back fence, put silicone sealer in the gap between the baseboard and the floor in the front bedroom, and replace the screws on the French-door hinge in the living room. I suppose these fall under the “not important and not
urgent” category, though if I ignore them long enough, they will become urgent. The time-management site understands this. According to it, the “not important” tasks have a “tendency to become emergencies if they are neglected.” If you drive a car, you’re probably familiar with that effect. There’s never enough time to stop by a gas station and fill up, but if you don’t, eventually you’ll run out. The bottom line seems to be do it all—just do it all in order.

Okay, but what about the things that aren’t so easy to schedule? The marriage that is on the rocks and doesn’t know it, or the torrid affair that any day might erupt into a scandal. How do you fit the fallout from these catastrophes into your day-planner? The heart, it seems, will not be time-managed. And what about finding some time for yourself? Time to think, to contemplate. I once heard a poet say that for a writer the perfect ratio of contemplative time to work time is three to one: three hours of what, to the casual observer, would appear to be puttering around, going on walks, perusing the wares in second-hand stores or simply standing at windows and staring vacantly out, to one hour of sitting down at the computer and writing. This is because, he claimed, all writers need downtime for their unconscious minds to consolidate the complexities of their current work. That way, when they do sit down to write, the writing flows easily. “It takes a lot of time being a genius,” Gertrude Stein once quipped. “You have to sit around so much doing nothing.”

But anyone can benefit from sitting around doing nothing. Because the world itself never stops. The wind blows, the sun shines. Today I sat out on my patio, doing nothing except sip a glass of shiraz and watch an empyrean late afternoon turn into evening. The sky was clear, the sweltering humidity of the last few days comfortably gone. The sunlight had a particular clarity, an emptiness, or maybe that was me, responding
to the angle of sun, which is imperceptibly beginning to decline. Time didn’t stop, it didn’t even slow down, but my own tranquility and enjoyment of the moment created an intimate theatre of time. Sunset became a mixture of incremental changes and direct movement.

Far above me, a silvery jet skimmed across the sky. It was silent and tiny and left a straight white contrail that gradually transformed into an irregular line of puffy cumulus clouds. Looking west, I watched the pink edge of the setting sun disappear behind my neighbour’s roof. The colour of the sunlight was changing constantly, though so gradually that I could never be sure when yellow turned to orange, and orange to pink. I looked up again at the jet contrail and there was hardly anything left—only a faint series of cloudlets. Above them, even higher, was a gauzy, rippled ocean of cirrus clouds, pale yet perfectly detailed.

A black squirrel ran across the lawn and climbed up the east fence, where it perched on the same post that the owl had perched on many months before. The yard was growing darker, more mysterious. When I looked up at the clouds again, everything had changed. All of them, the cirrus and the cumulus, had turned bright sulphur yellow as the sun began to touch the horizon. A flock of sparrows landed on the fence across the yard from the squirrel and sang up a storm. Were they gossiping, recounting their adventures from the day? The last sunlight, now a deep yellow-orange, caught the leaves in the treetops as the wind lifted up their silver undersides in languorous waves.

The clouds above the setting sun began to turn bright orange. The treetops that just moments ago had been alight were now eclipsed by a kind of aquatic shade. My present, I realized, was being sustained by the immediate past. Things remained the same, or changed so gradually that the present moment seemed to linger longer than it actually did. The clouds, the great oaks—everything around me seemed caught in a stuttering permanence.

Now the sunset started to transform into a spectacular conflagration. The whole western sky was domed with a filigree of fire as the cirrus clouds turned electric pink. It was an epic sunset, filled with burning galleons adrift on a light blue ocean. Ever the same and never the same from second to second in my absolute theatre of time. Each successive spreading ledge of flame surmounted the last in colour and intensity, like a Beethoven finale. Time was a conductor with time on her hands, touching each cloud, each leaf, each feather in turn, her masterpiece of nuance never ending. I had been embraced by time. And I had matched it, stride for stride, by simply opening myself to one of its spectacles.

time n.
1. Duration, indefinitely continued existence, progress of this viewed as affecting persons or things.

—
Oxford Concise Dictionary

The light this first, misty morning of August was a powdery gold. It was as if everything—my yard, the neighbourhood, the city—had been enclosed in a giant greenhouse. The day lilies in the laneway were refulgent with copper blooms, and the heavy foliage of the butternut rising above my neighbour’s yard was as still as sculpture. Everything was waiting; there was an electric, sensual anticipation in the atmosphere. This August reverie of mist and light and foliage has always reminded me of the paintings of the French artists Jean-Honoré Fragonard and William Bougereau. The same diffuse light illuminated their paintings of mythological nudes and cavorting gentry. Yet there is something of Correggio in the air, too. My garden could have been a backdrop to Correggio’s painting of Jupiter and Io, where Jupiter, disguised as a cloud, embraces Io. She has turned her head to kiss the wilful vapour. All morning I’ve heard the low, distant rumble of thunder. Perhaps this afternoon my thirsty lawn will drink some rain.

Like July, August is named after a Roman emperor. But Augustus was more beloved by the ancient Romans than Julius Caesar; indeed,
Augustus was regarded as Rome’s most benevolent ruler. His original name was Octavian, meaning “eighth,” so it was the eighth month that was designated to honour him. Historians mark the Augustan age as the apogee of Roman civilization, mainly because the reign of Augustus oversaw an extraordinary rejuvenation of the infrastructure. He said that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. The month of August finds summer a season of silver and leaves it a season of gold. I’ve always wondered why there is no North American holiday to celebrate August. In Canada we have a civic day off, marked by a long weekend during the first week of August, but nothing that acknowledges the month itself—the sun-bleached fields, the ripening peaches, the hazy afternoon vistas of distant forests and cities shimmering in the heat. At least Italy has a holiday that recognizes August. Celebrated on August 15 and called
ferragosto
, it’s the descendant of the old Roman holiday of Feriae Augusti, declared by Augustus as a holiday and a time to honour the harvest gods. Most contemporary Italians observe it with a picnic banquet at their favourite country retreat. Then they go on holiday.

This afternoon it didn’t rain. The main event was the landing of a peregrine falcon on top of the old television antenna at the back of my neighbour’s house. It was a female; I could tell by her large size and the dark barring across her breast, and she was not welcome. Local birds use the metal rods of the antenna as a perch and song roost. The multilingual starlings gurgle, purr and click from there, the grackles and sparrows land on it to survey adjacent yards for tidbits, mourning doves coo poignantly from its pulpit and, in the late afternoon, robins and cardinals turn it into a concert platform for their elaborate territorial performances. But today it was the peregrine’s turn to rule the roost, and the other birds, knowing her to be a killer, were furious. They dove
angrily at her and made close, twittering flybys. A pair of starlings even sat on the far side of the same antenna rung and screeched at the deadly intruder. The peregrine was unruffled. She made a few urgent, piercing calls and then launched herself off the antenna. She was looking for something.

An hour later a fledgling peregrine, almost full-grown, landed on the same antenna. I decided that it must have left the nest on its first solo flight and become separated from its mother, who would have been keeping close watch. I wondered where she’d got to. And I wondered what the Roman augurs would have made of my peregrine sightings. In terms of omens, eagles and falcons are thought to represent royalty. I’d like to think that the spirit of Augustus was conferring a benediction on me in recognition of my loyalty to his month.

In terms of the distance covered by earth during its orbit around the sun, August is about fifty million miles long, which means that since I saw the owl in March, the earth has travelled over two hundred million miles along its orbit. Time
is
space. And yet I don’t have any sense of so much distance, except that in August the light begins to slant, and by the end of the month there’s a bit of a
fin de siècle
nostalgia to its imperceptible limpidness. But still, August is invincible summer, the summer having reigned for months by the time August begins. Every living thing has settled into an aestive pattern that seems endless, as if it had always been thus. The paths that thread the fields and forests are well packed and dry, the corn is tasselling, and every backyard swimming pool is a jewelled fragment of Caribbean diaspora. You can let yourself imagine that summer will never end.

But the clock is ticking, and it makes for a slight undertone of urgency, especially towards the end of August. The backyard dinner
parties get more exuberant at night, the vacationing children become a little more wanton. Still, much as we may try to hold on to summer, the calendar flips ahead. The sun sets just a little earlier every week, and while we linger in the pink-gold light of August evenings, our inner clocks are being reset.

I
NTERNAL
C
LOCKS AND
M
EMORY

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;

In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart-throbs.

—
Philip James Bailey

Several layers of time coexist within us, like nested Russian dolls. In our deepest, most physical existence, we have body time, based on the circadian rhythms of our internal organs and hormones. These rhythms tell us when to sleep and when to wake up. They flow in tides of subtle moods and changing awareness. Our body time influences our mental or clock time, but ultimately our minds are independent of our bodies. The abstractions of past and future that allow us to plan our lives according to experience are the central index of our conscious lives and represent the outermost layer of personal time. But beneath our conscious, and unconscious, experience, we also possess deep brain time, the embedded clock that has us waking up seconds before the morning alarm rings. Neurologists theorize that this clock is located somewhere in the ventral striatum, and that its rate depends on the steady release of dopamine in the brain. The time distortion caused by marijuana, among other mind-altering drugs, is likely due to its effects on the dopaminergic system.

A Philadelphia psychologist named Stuart Albert recently proved that subjective, conscious time awareness, and possibly deep brain time, could be tinkered with. He shut two groups of volunteers into two separate rooms over a period of several days. Unbeknownst to the volunteers, he had modified the wall clocks. In one room, the clock ran at half speed; in the other, at double speed. Not only did the volunteers turn out to be unaware of the temporal sleight-of-hand, but Albert also discovered that their mental functions automatically adjusted to the two different paces. In memory tests, the average rate of forgetting, usually regarded as a brain function independent of the clock, was faster in the speedy group. And likewise, when asked to estimate various durations, the answers corresponded to each group’s relative time frame. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the experiment were to run longer. Would the volunteers’ circadian clocks eventually rebel? And what would happen if the subjective abstraction of clock time was removed altogether? The answer lies beneath the ground.

In January 1989, a young Italian volunteer named Stefania Follini began a solo four-month deep-cave sojourn to determine how our internal sense of time is affected if there are no clocks and no alternations of day and night. Stefania ate, slept and worked in a windowless twelve-by-twenty-foot room built within a cave in New Mexico. Within weeks her days had lengthened to twenty-five hours, and by the end of her sojourn she was staying awake up to forty hours at a time and sleeping between fourteen and twenty-two hours. After being in the cave for over four months, and just before the researchers told her that it was May and time to end the experiment, she was asked to estimate how much time had passed. “Two months,” she guessed. Her internal clock had reset its own rhythm to a tempo much slower than everyone else’s. It seems that without constant resetting by the alternation of night and day, our internal clocks drift, and hers had
drifted wildly. The final result, for her, was equivalent to time travel. She was transported two months into the future. No wonder her first words—when, sun-dazzled, she faced the reporters and waved to the waiting crowd—were, “Wow, man.”

T
IME AND
M
EMORY

Before technology turned us into creatures of time, we, like every other living being on this planet, had our hands too full of the demands of the present to notice the narrative, linear universe around us. We lived instead in circular time. Even though the stone-age world flowed irrevocably into the future—we got older, our tools wore down and new ones had to be made—time was more seasonal than sequential. The fruits we ate ripened on the same bushes at the same time of year in the same location, we knew where and when migratory animals had shown up previously, and so it paid off to have a good long-term memory to predict the future based on the past. With the advent of language, these lasting memories began to be shared with others, and the roots of civilization began. It is our special privilege as human beings to have more memory than we need. We are blessed with extraordinary, almost supernatural memory, memories that reanimate the past, and now, through our media, are also able to virtually reconstitute it. We realize the past more fully than any other living thing. It is so alive to us that it is almost as if our purpose here on earth is to make history conscious of itself—to incarnate our past, our species and our planet in living memory.

In our waking lives, our long-term memories are central to our identity. I am defined by a very specific set of personal, intimate memories. I remember a sunny winter afternoon when I was three and my older
brother let me ride on his shoulders. I remember my first palm tree. It was in the south of France and I was nineteen. I can feel my brother’s shoulders again, hear the crunch of the snow, see every frond of that palm tree. No one else can lay claim to these cardinal memories, this particular string of events that formed who I am. Memories are precise landmarks in the ocean of time; more than anything else, they represent us to ourselves. In fact, it’s not overstating the case to say that we
are
our memories, and that without them we would be empty. Perhaps that is why, when people are on the threshold of life and death, their whole life passes before their eyes. And why we find the stories of amnesiacs so compelling. Without memories amnesiacs are like babies, like clones, bereft of identity.

Once, when I was sleeping in a cabin in northern Ontario, I had a dream about cardinal memories. In the dream I walked through an abandoned city in some sort of post-apocalyptic world overgrown with vegetation. I came upon a concrete foundation that had a stairwell descending into its depths. I went down and there was a large concrete room, like an art gallery, illuminated by a few holes in the ceiling. Along the walls of the room were glass cases holding museum-style dioramas. I went up to the dioramas and looked at each one in turn. They were all three-dimensional, very lifelike depictions of human figures caught in the midst of life. Perhaps modelled in wax, I couldn’t tell. One scene in particular stood out for me: it was of a husband embracing his wife, two small children at their feet, both of whom were embracing his legs. The group was standing on a lawn not far from a dark blue, old-model sedan. Behind them the walls of the diorama depicted a small-town airport in the mid-1950s, with its control tower and terminal, all beneath a blue summer sky. I could see that a light breeze caught the wife’s hair,
and I knew that this reunion must have been the happiest moment of the husband’s life.

Each subsequent case also showed a person’s happiest moment, and I walked, spellbound, down the whole row. I remember water dripped from the crumbling ceiling and occasionally fell onto my head. After a while the tableaux, though still joyful, took on an almost funereal air. Where were these people now? I wondered. Had they chosen their happiest moments or had the moments been determined by some higher force? I woke up and considered the dream. I thought that I must have been realizing how, in our long-term memories, certain moments—happy or sad, traumatic or wistful—stand still, frozen in time, and how, altogether, they reinforce that which feels changeless within us. We are the same person now as we were years ago—a little older, certainly, but the same. And it is this unchanging self that is timeless. Our pure existence is profoundly felt as an eternal present, as if the passage of time were the illusion. Although we only really exist in the present, all of the experience that forms our identity comes from the past, which is why time and memory have such an intimate relationship. We can’t be who we are unless we
remember
who we were. Long-term memory is the trail we leave behind us, the crumbs that lead us back to ourselves. It is a bulwark against time’s ceaseless forward momentum and thereby gives us a direct sense of the permanence of history.

Short-term memory is something else entirely. It exists almost completely within the present and only retrieves the recent past. We use it as a practical tool to help us remember that a computer is on, that a casserole is in the oven or that a friend is coming by to pick up a jacket he left behind. Short-term memories are dispensable temporal maps. They are like a dissolving trace that evaporates as we move through
our lives. When we walk through a new building and notice the colour of the walls, the arrangement of the courtyard, the corridors and windows, these stay fresh in our minds for hours afterwards. But if we don’t revisit the building for few days, our short-term memories of it begin to fade. It’s as though, in our absence, things gradually disappear. If the building itself started to disintegrate as quickly as our short-term memory of it disappeared, it would be rubble within a few days, if not hours.