Time

It occurred to me that I haven't posted anything lately other than reports about my day, so here's a change of pace.

Last quarter I had a really great English professor (Tony Prichard; he's actually in the art history department, but he taught this course, too) who would have us write posts called provocations about the books that we read. They were meant to be semi-formal musings about basically whatever we wanted, as long as it pertained to something we'd read in the text. I wrote this in October. Here's to a good discussion on it...

I have to hurry and write this provocation—I have class in two hours. I just spent twenty-five minutes eating breakfast with a friend, two walking back to my room, and ten cleaning off my computer because I knocked a glass of milk all over the keyboard and had to wipe it up. Now I have only two hours to write this, post it, and run to another class before I go to Tony’s.

Not really. I did just eat with a friend and I did just drench my computer in milk, but I plan ahead better than that. I’m trying to illustrate the point that we are slaves to time.

Austerlitz criticizes time as “by far the most artificial of our inventions (100).” Referring to Newton’s concept of time as a river, he points out that rivers have sources. In other words, where (when) did time begin? Where will it end? Because we cannot cite a source, time is a product of our imagination. “There is no future, there is no past,” to quote Jonathan Larson. People invented time. If we don’t have time, what have we lost? Really nothing; we still have experiences, just outside of the context of linear chronology. He goes on about the possibility to “be outside of time (101).” Can we exist outside of time? If this moment exists, did the last one? Or rather, if this moment exists, did the last one matter? Austerlitz says that if we resist the power of time, “time will not pass away, has not passed away […] I shall find that all the moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case passed events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish (101).” So chronology doesn’t matter, then? When we review our lives, does it matter when something happened, or does the mere fact that it happened the only important thing?

The first thing I thought of in reading this was the concept of time as the fourth dimension, which I decided to look up. But it got into equations and physics, and being the mathematical idiot that I am, promptly abandoned that idea for the more philosophical one. I thought of the idea of eternal return that Milan Kundera spells out in the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which speaks of the idea of moments recurring infinitely in time, thus they lose their significance. “If the French Revolution were to occur eternally, the French would be less proud of Robespierre (Kundera, 2).” He proposes that if things occur without the “mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature (3),” and that “if every second of our lives occurs and infinite number of times, then we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect (3).” If we give up the idea of human time, (that is, time as a straight line, as Austerlitz seems to give us license to do) this becomes a more viable idea. After we’ve lived this moment, it might repeat continually, and we wouldn’t notice because in our concept of time, we keep moving forward. We won’t stay with this moment, but that doesn’t mean it will just fade away. In other words, this class period might continue into infinity. We wouldn’t know, because after we’ve counted eighty human minutes, we get up and leave it here.

I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about another friend, one who had passed on six months beforehand. When I mentioned the anniversary, he (who had lost his father some years ago and knew what he was talking about) replied, “Why are you counting the time? She’s no more or less gone than she was the day after it happened. Thinking of the time will kill you.” Touché. No matter how much time passes, she’s still dead and time won’t change that fact one way or the other. In other words, passing time does not change the past (how cliché is that?), so why do we bother with it? I was born twenty years ago, but why do I count years? It doesn’t change the fact that I was born. I grew, of course, but why should the twenty years matter? If, as Austerlitz says, it is possible to exist outside of time, then my age doesn’t matter, just the fact that I live, that I’ve grown, and that I’ve changed.

Yet we’re still slaves to time. Especially hours and minutes, especially regarding the school day and the academic quarter. For example, how many people reading this have a deadline in the next week? Or an exam? And who’s not counting the days until Thanksgiving break? As intriguing as the idea of abandoning time is, I’m still stuck with it. The fact that I have to rush off to my next class soon negates my entire argument in this provocation, or at least cheapens it. Sorry, Austerlitz. I do agree with time as an artificial concept, but that doesn’t mean I’m not in trouble if I don’t go along with it.

Thoughts, anyone?