Soul of the World (2 page)

Ultimately, it seems that every place in the cosmos exists as a temporal solitude isolated by relativity. Each place’s “now” cannot possibly be linked by a simultaneous universal instant that spans the cosmos at once. The only cosmic simultaneity that all parts of the universe can agree on is their distance in time from the birth of the universe. Otherwise it’s every region for itself. But these facts are more like diversions or abstractions compared with our day-to-day earthly reality. Although our planet is divided by time zones, for all intents and purposes it exists within a single moment of time. Our definition of “now” does not have to concern itself with the cosmos—at least not yet.

N
O
T
IME
L
IKE THE
P
RESENT

Despite the suppleness of time in the cosmos, each of us knows, viscerally, absolutely, that there is only the present. We cannot travel into the future and change things, nor can we travel into the past and change anything there. We are harnessed to the present moment. Even though we know our memories are real, from the perspective of the present our personal pasts might as well be illusions—we can never go back to revisit them. The past is locked away from us. Our discovery of photography, film and video has made the past more tantalizingly vivid, but no matter how much physical evidence we collect—the photographs on our wall, the souvenirs on our desk—we
can’t actually touch the past. This is our tragedy, and our liberation. I cannot revisit the night I saw the owl. Yet I will never have to relive my first frightening, exhilarating thunderstorm as a child. In fact, a second ago might as well be a hundred years ago. How eternally reinvented we are! The future is also opaque to us. In a sense we walk backwards into the future and see the present with a kind of peripheral vision.

The twentieth-century philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin has used this image too, comparing the present to an angel who backs into the future while gazing at the past as all the evidence of history piles like wreckage at his feet. “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”

So it is with us. Like passengers riding backwards on a train, we see only the landscape we have passed, but nothing ahead of us. Clocks and calendars allow us to measure time, to anticipate events in the future, and this is what gives us a false sense of vista, of being able to meditate on approaching events. We at least have the illusion of facing forward, like someone driving a car who can see objects ahead long before she passes them. We can savour a holiday before it arrives, and the dates pencilled on our calendars—the lunches, graduations and dental appointments—seem to stream towards us like items on a conveyor belt. But that is just an illusion, something that our measurement of time has inculcated in us. We know all too well that the future often arrives as a surprise.

Yet our collective sense of the present, the one we all agree upon, is not the same as our private sense of “now.” Our personal sense of time is unique, even though we know that others experience relatively the
same flow from future to past, the same simultaneity. Perhaps it might be possible in our individual “now” to actually seize the evanescent border between past and future, and experience time like an elemental force. But even this is difficult. Our personal experience of time shows how elusive the present moment is, the “here and now” that never tarries.

The present is like a needle on a spinning record out of which the past emerges millisecond by millisecond. Only in this case the needle is
making
the record as it plays. It’s a magic act, really, like a conjuror pulling endless coloured scarves out of a hat. But the hat is so small it’s invisible. There’s hardly anything to “now.” In fact “now” is so ethereal it is more like a mathematical point. And, it seems, the present is almost infinitely divisible. We keep measuring smaller and smaller units of time in an elusive search for a pure, irreducible “now.” The American mathematician David Finkelstein speculates that ultimately there might exist “chronons,” indivisible packets of time, like the quantum particles that make up matter, beyond which we will not be able to divide the present moment. At this point, though, the search seems endless. The heart of “now” may well be beyond the grasp of science. If so, and if time can be divided into smaller and smaller units without end, then time is infinite inwards! We only have to speed up our consciousness to experience eternity in a single second.

T
OUCHING
T
IME

There is no time like the here and now, as the saying goes, which means something like “seize the moment” or “make hay while the sun shines.” But in a stricter, more literal sense, there really
is
no time like the present. “Now” is all we have to work with, and “now” is the only point at which I thought I might be able to touch time itself, experience it anew.

The more I immersed myself in time’s paradoxes, the more I got to know its slippery properties. Nothing is more intimate than time, which is inside and outside us, but how can we contact it? As an experiment, I decided to try to experience the flow of time, as if it were something elemental. I would try to feel its current, like a diviner looking for water. I went out into my yard and concentrated as completely as I could on the moment, on feeling the passage of time from second to second. I didn’t know how to detect this flow—I didn’t even know what I was supposed to feel—but I tried with whatever part of me could feel it, in an act of fierce will.

I had precedents, of course. William James, the famous American psychologist, once attempted something similar. “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.” Paul Cézanne, the great French painter who had some claim to being the father of modern art, also tried to seize the present and experience it. He wrote, “Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment…”

After several days of trying, something happened: I had a fleeting experience of not only the moment, but of the texture of time itself.

T
IME
W
IND

I have a small patch of evergreen broadleaf bamboo growing at the edge of my patio. It’s a species of Japanese bamboo that is surviving at the northern limit of its range. The leaves are emerald green and tropical, providing, along with my rhododendron, the only summer foliage in
my early spring yard. On the last night of March, a warm wind began blowing out of the south and I went outside to feel the first breath of summer. The night was filled with stars. Jupiter, the calendrical planet of the Mayan timekeepers, glowed brightly at the centre of the southern sky. The breeze was rustling the bamboo leaves, and as the wind swirled up I felt its balmy touch on my skin.

Then, suddenly, it felt as if the wind was blowing deeper than my skin, somehow streaming through me, very gently. This warm current of air was subtly combing through my skin, my muscles, my bones, my very cells. It seemed I could feel it penetrating them all, and I realized that this was what time was, at least for me: a wind that blows through flesh—in fact, through all substance. As quickly as the revelation came over me, the sensation vanished. Once again, exiled from time’s touch, I was left looking at the leaves of the bamboo rustling in the night breeze.

Afterwards I wondered if this was entirely my own, unique experience of time, or was it possible that I really had, at least for that brief instant, experienced something profound, something new and intrinsic about time? A few days later I came across these lines in the poem “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through,” by D. H. Lawrence: “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! / A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.” There it was. He too had felt the wind of time. For him, as we learn later in the poem, it was an empty sort of wind, almost sinister, yet ultimately thrilling. He wanted to be carried away by it, to become the new direction of time.

For me, it meant that the flow of time was more ethereal than I had thought, a sort of sandstorm so finely grained that nothing was impervious to it. Time, I realized, could blow through steel and concrete and planets as easily as through empty space. Everything is a sieve to time and time is everywhere. You cannot shut it out. You can lock a diamond in a steel box inside a thousand tons of concrete and time will still blow
through that diamond as easily as a breeze through a screen door on a summer afternoon.

T
HE
S
TEALTH OF
T
IME

One way of experiencing the effects of time without meditating on the present moment, as I did in my yard, is to experience its effects over a relatively short period. We can know it more intimately, perhaps, if we witness the invisible action of time on the world we know the best. As Lucretius wrote in the first century
A.D.
, “No man, we must confess, feels time itself, / But only knows of time from flight or rest of things.”

We’ve probably all seen the effects of time on objects in our home upon returning from a vacation. At first everything is reassuringly the same—the chairs and tables and furniture are clean and just where you left them, a shopping list you made is still on the kitchen table. The fridge is humming peacefully. The drapes are closed, as they were when you left. But there are some changes, evidence of time’s infiltration. An apple in a bowl on the counter has withered and become wrinkled. The water in a tumbler beside the bathroom sink has evaporated completely, leaving a graduated series of white rings down the inside of the glass.

It’s as if some presence, something no lock or security system could stop from entering, had been in your home while you were away, delicately changing things and going about its subtle business. Most things look the same, but in fact everything has been touched by time’s fingers: the varnish on the wooden chairs is a little yellowier, the refrigerator motor is slightly more worn, the foundation of the building itself has settled imperceptibly. In a sense, you haven’t come back to the same place. Time’s thieves have been there, replacing all your original possessions with slightly altered copies.

So even if time would seem, at least intuitively, to be one of the easiest things to observe, it is still elusive. It may be everywhere, it may touch everything in our homes, and there may be nothing outside of time, nothing that doesn’t reflect its passage, yet time remains intangible. Like Lucretius we see only the results of its action, not the thing itself. Time is intimate beyond any intimacy, but untouchable. It is like the wind in the grass.

But there is a deeper sense in which we humans, more than any other living creatures, experience the passage of time. Over the millennia our penchant for technology and abstract thought has helped us to construct an empire of time, a chronological culture within which our lives are scheduled and measured out. Not only do we measure time and use it to regulate our work and creation, we also use it for entertainment and art. Many of the time-based arts, such as music and film, dance with, and within, time. As we’ll see further on in this book, we are new sorts of beings on this planet; we are time creatures, and we exist in time unlike anything else alive. There may be older living things, there may be faster metabolisms, but we are masters of time. Time is to our existence as air is to owls, and if we fly at all we fly through time. As Edward Fitzgerald wrote in
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
, “The Bird of Time has but a little way / To fly—and Lo! the bird is on the wing.”

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

—
Hector Berlioz

I measure rain by the bucket. Not in the sense of the old saying “It’s raining buckets,” but literally. Whenever it rains I put a galvanized bucket under the downspout of an eavestrough that drains the small roof over my back stairs. I use the rainwater for my indoor plants. Half a bucket is a decent rain. A full bucket is a downpour, a real drenching. Over the past few days I could have filled the bucket a dozen times.

The first week of April brought not just spring showers but a deluge that went on for days. Rain drummed on my roof at night like a tropical monsoon. Rain poured down the trunk of the maple tree on the front lawn and made little piles of foam where it met the soil. When I drove to the grocery store, rain washed my car cleaner than a car wash. During one downpour the street in front of my house brimmed with water to the curb tops and became a shallow canal that rushed westwards. Robins feasted on drowning worms, and wet, bedraggled squirrels sat glumly on tree branches. Seagulls invaded the neighbourhood, and one morning I heard ducks. Every evening the local news showed pictures of marooned cars and basements with chairs bobbing in thigh-deep water.

One wet afternoon I drove downtown to meet my publisher. Rain had soaked everything. Billboard advertisements were peeling off—a fashion model’s forehead had folded over her face. Dark fingers of damp concrete streaked the sides of apartment buildings. In my car the dashboard clock was too misty for me to read the time. I tried to wipe it off but couldn’t—the condensation was trapped inside. My chronometer had become a tiny terrarium. Above me, even the clouds pressed closer, as if the weight of the rain had pulled them down from the sky. Low enough that the tops of skyscrapers—including my publisher’s—disappeared into them. I parked in a humid underground parking lot, grabbed my umbrella and walked outside.

Water world. Cars sprayed by like motorboats, arcing canopies of water over sidewalks. Umbrellas bobbed everywhere, like glistening tents. They crashed into each other above the crowded sidewalks. The air was warm, though, and a secret, vernal thrill lurked in the lush humidity. When I got to my publisher’s, I tapped the rain out of my umbrella in the lobby and took an elevator up into the clouds.

Taking in the view from the windows on the twentieth floor was like looking out of an airplane flying through thick cloud: nothing but a featureless, marine grey tone with a hint of blue-green. I checked my watch and was surprised to see that I was on time, despite my misty automobile timepiece and the many small distractions that had kept me anchored in the present. Outside, the downpour seemed to have washed both past and future away, but here, in the office tower, time ruled again.

My publisher took me to a conference room surrounded on two sides by large plate-glass windows that held back an ocean of fog. The noise and drama of the city were smothered below it; all was ethereal and still. We talked for almost an hour, and afterwards she walked me to the elevator. Through the windows behind her I noticed that the clouds were at last beginning to lift. The elevator doors closed, and I
descended back down into the rain. As I drove home, casting my mind forward to what I could make for dinner, a flash lit up the whole sky and turned it a deep electric green. Lightning. The first storm of the year. Thunder was booming when I pulled up in front of my house, and gusts bent the new daffodils in my garden. Jupiter was busy, his chariot rumbling through the clouds.

T
HE
G
OD OF
T
IME

Time is a modern invention. We take time for granted, living inside the minutes, months and years as if they were comfortable clothes. But there was a time before clocks, an era in which the most remarkable aspect of time was not that it could be measured accurately but that it flowed, implacably, in a single direction instead of lingering forever in eternity. This one-way directionality is the tyranny of time, a moving sidewalk we can’t step off. But the gods understood that it was both a blessing and a tragedy.

None of the early gods, those of Greece and Rome, had dominion over time except Cronos. Even Jupiter, Cronos’s son and the mightiest of all, could not turn back the clock. Although classical scholars differ in their interpretations, down through the ages, Cronos (or Saturn, as the Romans named him) has become popularized as the god of time. Cronos’s hair-trigger temper and his sense of regal entitlement seemed to have been passed on to his son, for in Jupiter’s rages, which were frequent, he would sometimes hurl lightning bolts to earth.

Cronos features very early in Greek legends. He was born to the first two gods, Uranus and Gaia, who represented heaven and earth respectively. Uranus, deathly afraid of being usurped by his children, confined Cronos and his siblings within Gaia’s womb, but she
subverted her husband by secretly slipping a sharp-edged sickle to her son Cronos. The next time Uranus “came close,” as one legend tactfully put it, Cronos castrated him with the sickle. The blood that spilled from Uranus’s wound then formed the Giants and the Furies, while his penis, which had been thrown into the sea, took on a life of its own and eventually transformed into Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.

With his sickle, Cronos ruptured the idyllic eternity where all beings are immortal—a temporal Garden of Eden—and a harsh world governed by time hemorrhaged forth, like the blood from Uranus’s emasculating wound. I see this as the mythological beginning of the irreversible flight of time from the past into the future. As Plutarch wrote, “There is Eternity, whence flowed Time, as from a river, into the world.” The arrow of time had been loosed.

Cronos, in turn, married and had five children. Because it had been foretold that he would be overthrown by one of his children, just as he had overthrown his father, he swallowed each of them at birth. But, like Gaia before her, Rhea outwitted her husband. By giving Cronos a stone to swallow instead of her newborn son Jupiter, she managed to save at least one of her offspring.

Some have interpreted Cronos eating his children as an allegory about time, which, like a parent, brings them into being but which also outlives and ultimately destroys them. As Ovid observed in his
Metamorphoses
, at the beginning of the first millennium
A.D.
, “Time is the devourer of all things.” Writers and artists have flirted with this cannibalistic theme throughout the ages, though none as graphically as Francisco Goya.

There is a famous painting by Goya, completed in 1823, that hangs in the Prado museum in Madrid. Entitled
Saturn Devouring One of His Sons
, it is one of fourteen of Goya’s works known as the “black paintings”, with which he decorated the interior of his house in Madrid.
The painting is literal, and macabre. Against a nightmarish black background, a naked, bug-eyed Father Time is eating one of his small sons, holding the bloody, headless corpse in his strong hands while tearing off an arm with his teeth. It was in his dining room that, perhaps ironically, Goya chose to hang this disturbing work.

On another level, Goya’s interpretation is part of a more recent, sanguinous tradition in our characterization of time. As Aldous Huxley wrote in “Seasons”: “Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; / The wound is mortal and is mine.” Like Saturn’s father, Uranus, we bleed time from the wound of mortality. Like Saturn’s children we are sacrificed—that which time creates, time also destroys. But the original Greek myth vied with a philosophical view of time whose characterization was less visceral. Even philosophers of the twentieth century, such as Bertrand Russell, took a more optimistic view of this ancient myth. Echoing Plutarch, he wrote in
A Free Man’s Worship and Other Essays
, “A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.”

Russell was anticipating the meditative tranquility of modern physicists’ notion of a “timescape” in which the past and future commingle. But time’s arrow still rules our daily life, and the past seems to press against the back of every second.

Every day, I negotiate between consuming the present—drinking my coffee, savouring it—and being consumed by the tyranny of time. It may not swallow me, but it gnaws away. It says, “In five more minutes you will be late for your class, your students are waiting for you.” We flirt and bicker with time like this all day long. As Andrew Marvell wrote, “At my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” In the slam of the car door the moment before we realize the engine is
on and the keys are in the ignition, in the moment after we mistakenly press “send all” on a piece of very private email, the deed has already slipped into the past. History owns it now.

Yet Cronos continues to live on. Not only is he the origin of our present-day Father Time, he also gave us the English term for the study of time: horology. The Greeks regarded Cronos as the father of the Horae, the hours. They also regarded him as all-powerful because he presided over the two most important aspects of our existence: the world and the mind. He brought things into being, he aged them and he made them disappear. On top of which, he ruled the intellect. After all, without the ordered flow of time, what could be learned or accomplished? With no “before” or “after,” no cause and effect, our mental world would disintegrate into meaninglessness.

Ultimately, Cronos was not the victim of his son’s rage, for the Greeks believed that Cronos existed in two forms: his absolute form was eternity and his relative form was time. He always had one foot outside of mortal time. Maybe that’s how he evaded Jupiter’s final revenge, shuffling the cards of past, present and future in order to escape to Italy, where he remained in exile as the Roman god Saturn. Ultimately, he was a mysterious god. He wasn’t physically present in the world. Except for his actions he was unseen. He was also unheard. As William Shakespeare wrote (in a rare tautologous moment) in
All’s Well That Ends Well
, “The inaudible and noiseless foot of time.”

Over the millennia Cronos was often conflated with Chronos, the Greek personification of time. But Chronos was more an idea than a deity. His name was the source of such time-related words as
chronology, chronicle
and
synchronous.
In fact, all the instruments we use to measure time preserve his name: chronometers, for instance, the clocks that ocean-going vessels used to navigate the seas along with sextants before GPS was invented. The aged, sickle-wielding figure of Saturn,
as he was portrayed in Roman statues and representations, has also persisted, turning up in editorial cartoons and in New Year’s imagery as the slightly pathetic figure of Father Time.

F
ATHER
T
IME

He has a long, white beard and always carries the tools of his trade: a scythe and an hourglass. The scythe represents the harvest of the bounty of time (and, by association, death), while the hourglass stands for the ceaseless flow of time (and the measure of how little we have left). This association of Father Time’s scythe with death is echoed by another figure, the Grim Reaper, who also brandishes a scythe. In fact, the Reaper, who sometimes carries an hourglass as well, resembles a skeletal version of the more benevolent Father Time. Reflecting his Roman reincarnation as the god of agriculture, Father Time’s scythe is said to represent the waxing and waning of the seasons and the regenerative cycle of the crops. Some link the shape of the scythe to the crescent moon. Others say that the scythe represents the flint sickle that Cronos used to castrate his father.

Father Time’s old age has long symbolized the wisdom and the unfathomable depths of time. In the modern era, though, he seems to have become, strangely, a slightly buffoonish anachronism. At some point an editorial cartoonist decided to use the image of Father Time to depict the “old year,” and since then it has become a standby. In New Year’s Day cartoons, the outgoing year slumps away into the past, usurped and humiliated by a baby in diapers that represents the coming year. Any veneration that the classical image of Father Time once generated has been tarnished. Perhaps this modern incarnation of Cronos reflects our belief that Cronos’s power over us has diminished.
His anachronistic implements, his scythe and hourglass, have been usurped by harvesters and atomic clocks.

T
HE
F
LOW OF
T
IME

My next-door neighbour, an older Portuguese man, has a weather vane that he’s nailed to a pole in his yard. He and his wife have lived here for years. He tends his fruit trees and vegetable garden according to the seasons; he is attuned to the earth and the cycles of the year. Weather is important to him, as it is to all farmers, and the weather vane, shaped like an arrow, gives him warning by pointing out the direction of the wind. An east wind almost always portends rain. All last week, during the deluge, the arrow pointed east. I like to think of his weather vane as the stationary arrow of time present, pointing into the future as the wind of time flows past. I imagine it without its pole, hovering in the air in mid-flight, like Zeno’s Arrow.

Zeno of Elea was born in 488
B.C.
in Magna Graecia, a Greek colony in southern Italy. He was adopted and raised by the philosopher Parmenides. Zeno became a philosopher also, and when he came of age he went to Athens with Plato and founded his own school there. Among his students were Socrates and Pericles. During his career he devised a famous paradox, now known simply as “Zeno’s Arrow.” The paradox involves movement—Zeno used the analogy of an arrow in flight—and one interpretation of his paradox declares that an arrow shot towards a target will never reach it. According to this first interpretation, if an arrow in flight has travelled half the distance to its target, it still has to travel the remaining distance. If you divide the remaining
distance in half, the arrow must traverse that distance as well. But what if you kept halving the distance to the target, in smaller and smaller divisions? You end up dividing the remaining space infinitely. If that is the case, declared Zeno, the arrow will never hit its target because it will always have to cross a distance that can be infinitely halved.