Soul of the World Read online

  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.

  TOUCHING TIME

  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.

  TIME WIND

  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.

  THE STEALTH OF TIME

  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.”

  Chapter Two

  TIME’S ARROW

  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.

  THE GOD OF TIME

  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.