But “on board” the photon, time has stopped, and all this vast commotion of stars and galaxies is taken into its timeless heart. As the Australian astrophysicist Paul Davies writes, “At the speed of light itself, time stands still.” Light is a strange thing. It somehow exists outside of time yet within it. Perhaps that’s why sunlight, the strongest source of light we know, seems filled with nostalgia, at least for poets. It pines for a universe it can never touch, even as it warms and illuminates it. Its destiny is eternity, slipping ahead of everything on its one-way journey, at the speed limit of the universe, to the edge of time.
ETERNITY
It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.
—Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart
I landed in Cayo Largo yesterday, in the middle of a tropical storm. It was the afternoon of the first Saturday in July. Just before landing, the jet emerged out of low clouds and, as it descended, cruised over fifty miles of small keys and reefs. The coral lagoons studded the shallow, blue-green ocean like precious stones, and I could imagine snorkelling through each and every one of them. “Let me off here!” I thought. With a parachute, snorkel, mask and flippers, I would have all I needed.
After the plane landed and we disembarked, the first rush of Caribbean air at the door of the airplane submerged me in an element midway between liquid and air. My light cotton pants and T-shirt immediately felt like hot flannel. The tarmac was wet, and the rainslicked fan palms semaphored in the wind beside the entrance to the small terminal. By the time I’d got to the hotel and had eaten dinner, it was dark. Lightning flickered around the open-air dining room, though by the time I returned to my room to sleep, the rain had stopped.
This morning the sky is perfectly clear and the ocean still. After breakfast I go searching for a reef and find one—a long streak of dark blue-green against the pale turquoise of the ocean—close to shore at the north end of the resort’s beach. It’s high tide, and the low swells are just cresting over the coral. I hurry back to my room, grab my snorkel and flippers, and within minutes I’m floating over paradise.
There are all my old friends—the sergeant major fish, the psychedelic parrotfish and serene schools of blue tangs. Like a crown jewel, a queen triggerfish swims by, its flagrantly tropical body adorned with electric-blue flashes. Below, the fantastic shapes of brain coral, staghorn coral and sea fans spike up. I can hear the reef tick, like an irregular clock, as the parrotfish and wrasse forage through the coral, picking at it with their beaks. This ubiquitous tinkling and clicking, like rolling cinders, seems a curiously dry noise for such a submerged world.
And everywhere there’s life, floating and profligate. In the sky above me, frigate birds drift, their own medium a blue fluid quicker than water. But it’s the wind and waves that stir it all. Occasionally the backwash from a big wave creates undertow that spills tangs, trumpetfish and gobies over the brain coral at the reef’s edge and into the blue depths beyond the drop-off. This spur-and-groove reef has been formed by thousands of years of waves, and the sand flats between the coral chimneys seem unchanged since the Devonian period. Everything, including me, rocks in slow circles with the waves, like riders on a bus swaying in unison with the curves of the road. We roll together in the subsurface squeeze and flow of swells, a confederacy of helpless, living jelly in the ocean.
After an hour or so I return to my room, lie down on my bed in the air-conditioned coolness. I can still feel the ocean swells in my body. I drift off. When I awake it’s just after four o’clock in the afternoon. I pull back the curtains and I know, as soon as I see the light on the yellow stucco walls of the adjacent building, that this is the time. Each island in the Caribbean has its own hour of eternity, a signal hour that epitomizes the endless summer of the tropics. In Bonaire it arrives around five or six in the afternoon, as the sun angles low. In Cozumel it happens later, just before sundown. On Cayo Largo I am surprised to see it arriving so early.
I go out onto the balcony, and the surging heat is another surprise. The sun is lower in the sky. The light is a slightly diminished tropical sunlight, the stunned opulence of permanent heat, that is tempered just enough to bring out the infinity of time locked in its beams. I see it most clearly in the shining highlights on the fronds of the coconut palms outside my second-floor balcony. Their improbably large pinnate leaves rustle in a vague breeze. Behind them, the ocean, the orange and yellow rustic villas and the infinite blue of the sky, holding a single frigate bird that hovers above the dunes, are like a picture of themselves. Time stands still for an hour, and in that brief, extravagant, all-encompassing eternity there is a humming abundancy, a poignancy that saturates the sunlight and the palms.
BEYOND TIME
The idea of eternity has excited, terrified and inspired people since the beginning of civilization, and probably before that. Over the millennia we have discovered two kinds of eternity: one an endless period of time, an infinity; the other timelessness, a special state with no future or past, only an infinite present. Of the two, the second must be closest to the real eternity, because if there is a past and a future, no matter how long their duration, there must also have been a beginning, and there must also be an end. Right now, our universe is still relatively young at 13.7 billion years, and you could argue that the lifespan of the universe might as well represent an eternity, since the ultimate length of its existence—billions upon billions of years—is beyond individual comprehension. We can know these numbers, but we cannot feel them the way we do a normal lifespan. As the old Jamaican saying goes, “Who feels it, knows it.” The longest time we can know in a human lifetime is a century, though the only centenarian of my acquaintance says she feels like she’s lived an eternity.
If we aren’t able to experience real eternity, at least the eternity of duration, we can at least experience more immediate eternities. In his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” Like Zen monks do. When the owl enthralled me in March, I was so completely in the moment that I experienced a flash of what felt like Zen eternity. But not all experiences of infinitude are such revelations. There are banal eternities too—the red light that never turns green, the bank lineup where time stands still, the Internet download that doesn’t end. Although frustrating, and boring, these moments can be almost as intense an experience of time standing still as emotional epiphany is.
The mystic sense of time standing still is intrinsically more interesting and almost always more spiritual. In his 1929 Gifford Lecture, Ernest Barnes, an Anglican bishop and physicist, recounted a profound experience of eternity during a walk to a beach on the coast of England. “I remember,” he said, “that I was going to bathe from a stretch of shingle to which the few people who stayed in the village seldom went. Suddenly the noise of the insects was hushed. Time seemed to stop. A sense of infinite power and peace came upon me. I can best liken the combination of timelessness with amazing fullness of existence to the feeling one gets in watching the rim of a great silent fly-wheel or the unmoving surface of a deep, strongly flowing river. Nothing happened: yet existence was completely full. All was clear.”
The crucial image in Barnes’s vision is his metaphor of the flywheel. Large, spoked iron wheels, often twenty feet in diameter and weighing several tons, flywheels were used to drive machinery in the industrial era. Their flat outer rims were so precisely machined that, if you ignored the whirring spokes, you saw hardly any difference between a moving flywheel and one that had stopped. Barnes’s metaphor is excellent, for you can touch the rim as it moves and feel the surface slipping by under your finger, as I once did on a public-school class trip to an industrial museum in Greenfield, Michigan. But he gives us another metaphor, just to nail it—this tim
e, of a river. Again, immense power and movement with a deceptively calm surface. It is as if, standing still, he had witnessed the flow of time itself as it whirred past him.
Barnes’s experience of eternity is altogether different from the eternity of the monotheistic religions, most notably Christianity, which hold out the promise of an actual, durational eternity in an afterlife. Many religious writers have talked about this, though none so eruditely, to my mind at least, as Benedict Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher. According to Spinoza, who was a pantheist, “God and all the attributes of God are eternal.” He goes on to say that since we are one with God, “We feel and know that we are eternal.” His certainty came from philosophical knowledge and spiritual conviction, though it is hard to say how literally he took the notion of eternity in an afterlife.
When I was young and had trouble getting to sleep, my mind would drift towards strangely cosmic themes. I would grow very anxious and claustrophobic when I thought about life and the fact that we die. I’d try to temper the idea of mortality with that of eternity, which was certainly preferable. But then I found myself imagining what it would be like to exist forever—unchanging, infinite existence would be just as intolerable—and I’d get existential agoraphobia, fear of wideopen spaces. Both alternatives seemed equally frightening. As Joseph Addison, the English essayist and poet, put it in 1713, “Eternity! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!”
Years later it occurred to me that there might be a solution—two solutions, in fact—to the potential agony of eternal existence. The first was to exist completely in the moment, unaware of past or future. That way, the prospect of an interminable infinity in front of you could be avoided. The other solution was to constantly transform yourself. If you gradually changed, becoming in effect someone else, then you could easily cope with eternal existence because you would be a series of different beings, none of them technically immortal. I would choose the first, though in daily life I manage to live it only in rare moments.
There is something of the eternal, also, in romantic love. At its heart it is immortal, and, like life itself, love seems confined by the limits of mortality—it can easily last a lifetime. As the English poet John Donne wrote, “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” In so much romantic art, music and literature, the abiding theme involves love that will last till the end of time, that will stay true forever. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare evoked this theme when he wrote, “Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows bent.” It is as if the strength and purity of the lovers’ emotions transcended time itself—though time is both an ally and an enemy of lovers. When lovers are apart, the minutes crawl by, but when they finally unite, time takes on another aspect altogether—their sojourn in bliss is not measured by the clock. Eternity burnishes their bodies; it is the streaming pulse of their passion, their longing.
My week in Cayo Largo ended too quickly, even if time stood still for one enchanted hour every afternoon. And a week is hardly an eternity, though time did pass differently for me there, almost as if I were one of the relativistic twins. My seven-day idyll felt more like two weeks than one, so that on my return yesterday evening it seemed I had been away longer. But here’s the relativistic effect: I phoned my next-door neighbour who’d agreed to look after my house while I was away. “Are you back already?” he said. Obviously, for him, it seemed like less than a week had passed.
Apparently the formation of new memories does, in fact, alter our sense of the passage of time. Dinah Avni-Babad, a psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has studied the relationship between habit, memory and time and has found that in our routine existence we operate out of habit, as if we are on autopilot. Time passes more quickly for us because everything we do is repeated daily. We don’t form new memories. But new experiences form new memories that, from a subjective viewpoint, expand the sense of time. So if you want to live longer, or at least have the experience of it, you should shake up your routine. Get away if you can. I recommend Cayo Largo.
Late this afternoon I sat on my patio, enjoying the lushness of my garden. In the centre of my yard there’s a potted fan palm—a washingtonia—that’s too big for the house. I board it every winter at a greenhouse, and its return to my yard each spring is an occasion. Last month it was delivered by two men and a truck. The palm in its oversize terracotta pot instantly became, as it always does, the tropical focus of the yard. The tomato plants and basil were well started and the rhododendron was still flowering. The slanting sun spotlighted my new banana tree, which, according to a little label hung on one leaf, is a new species that is winter-hardy if it’s cut back and mulched. We’ll see. My yard is a small, tropical oasis that harks back to Cayo Largo, though I miss the saturated tropical sun and the late-afternoon peek into eternity.
And yet the yellow roses by my patio were blooming mightily and there was a poignancy to the late-afternoon sunlight. The rose blossoms. Above and behind them, plumed thunderheads glowed pink on the horizon, echoing the shapes of the oak trees. Eternal in its transience, infinite in its uniqueness, my garden was a still life, a tableau flooded with cosmic nostalgia. The partially opened rose and the other one that was already losing its petals…that particular scene would never occur again in the whole existence of the universe. It was bookended by eternity.
Chapter Seven
SHAPING TIME
Time is at the heart of all that is important to human beings.
—Bernard d’Espagnat
We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx
JANUS OF NOW
This morning I had a claustrophobic experience, probably because my sense of time’s passage has been heightened lately. I’ve become disturbingly aware of how quickly the present recedes into the past. What happened was, I was listening to music on my computer and watching the cursor that shows what part of the song is playing, when it struck me that the cursor was a metaphor for my own existence. But with two big differences: I didn’t know how long my “music” would last, and I couldn’t click and drag my location in time forwards or backwards. Then I realized there was another difference, and this is where my sense of claustrophobia was centred. “Now,” our personal black dot, is a fixative. Its trailing edge instantly freezes the movements of whatever action is surfing in from the future on the wave of the present. As narrow as “now” is—and it is narrow—it still has two sides, one closed, the other open. Its trailing side closes off all possibility of change, while its forward, future-facing edge allows all change. The universe and everything in it are like angels dancing on the head of this pin. All that moves—planets, butterflies, soccer games, dozing monkeys, ballerinas and aging wine—becomes instantly locked into permanent, sculptural history by the freezing action of the trailing edge of the past.
And then another possibility occurred to me and reversed all my notions about the direction of time. Maybe, I thought, the direction of the flow isn’t from the future into the past. What if “now,” the present moment, is a membrane pushed upwards on the surface of an expanding past, which, as it blossoms towards the future, crystallizes everything that occurs? Any way you look at it, it seems that movement is a miracle. There’s so little time in the present moment. How does anything happen at all if “now” is so fleeting, especially if it is so much less than we could possibly know?
St. Augustine pondered time mightily. He too, as we saw earlier, was preoccupied by the riddle of the present. In his Confessions, he wrote, “How can the past and future be when the past no longer is and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time but eternity.” Here again, eternity seems to flower out of the present, “every instant of time, a pin-prick
of eternity,” as enlightened emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations. Still, it seems to me that “now” is a like a thin plane that the future passes through, transforming as it flows past the present into the unmoving past. Or maybe “now” is more like an incredibly fast construction crew building a high-rise. As they climb into nothingness, they leave a concrete building behind. Or do they? From our perspective, riding along with the construction and confined only to the present, the building might as well disappear beneath us as it’s being constructed. The present is ready just in time, for a one-time-only use. We’ll never take the elevator down—or up, for that matter.
But if the past and the future exist at once, as the physicists say, then perhaps the present is only the illusion of movement, like a laser light show at a dance club. As the laser slices the smoke in cross-section, new, convoluted landscapes are revealed, the very same way that the future seems to unfold. It’s all very perplexing. Maybe I should adopt the English essayist Charles Lamb’s attitude. In a letter he sent to Thomas Manning on a cold winter day in January 1810, he wrote, “Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.”
Yesterday I decided to lie on a towel in my backyard and sunbathe. It was a hot, mid-July afternoon, and cicadas rasped their shimmering songs in the trees. I figured I’d sun myself for a half-hour, and, since I wanted to tan evenly, I knew I’d have to turn over at least once in that time, after fifteen minutes. But that would neglect my sides. If I divided the fifteen-minute periods in half, I would be able to devote equal time to my whole body. But here is where division of the hour into sixty minutes breaks down, since fifteen minutes cannot be divided evenly. Half of fifteen minutes is seven and a half minutes, and half of seven and a half minutes is three and three-quarters. I lay on my stomach pondering the math of this odd little corner of horology, when my thoughts were derailed by a new vista—my view, just above the level of the grass, went along the length of the yard to the garage. I was in the world of insects.
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