past us, fast flow,
like a river rushing over gray stones
Time drips
slower than slow
like thick sap hanging from pine cones
I’m not sure time is real. I mean, things happen. Entropy and whatnot. But I don’t know if I accept that measuring the pace of happenings is anything more than a construct.
Don’t get me wrong. I know the world is round, or a close approximation thereof. I’m down with the science. But physicists, as a group, aren’t united on what time is. Something about time being “measured and malleable in relativity while assumed as background (and not an observable) in quantum mechanics.”
So while we experience it as real, it may not be “fundamentally real.”
And that’s kinda how it feels to me.
I remember my 6th grade English teacher, Mrs. Newman (Ms. was not to her liking), telling us that the older you get, the faster time goes by. I’m not sure why, but that idea immediately clung to me. Though I was only 11 years old, or perhaps in part because of it, I got what she was saying. And I believed her. After all, she had lived four or five or six times (who could tell) as long as I had. So even though what she was describing sounded like a cliché passed on from generation to generation, I assumed her own experiences had borne it out. During the four and a half decades since, I have always remembered her words and noticed that, in a general sense, she was absolutely correct. Back then, a summer was endless. Now, the years roll on like a spare tire picking up speed down a hill.
But that is a historical observation I make as I look back. My present, like everyone else’s, stretches and squeezes like an accordion.
Sometimes the second hand ticks slowly, as when I’m wrapped up in anticipation, or enduring monotony. It’s a well known phenomenon that time will seem to slow down during intense, dangerous situations as your brain goes into overdrive and perceives things much more quickly.
Other situations can lead time to race. When I’m having fun, particularly with others. When I’m being creative, writing words or music. In these circumstances, time can melt. I’ll look up and wonder where those three hours went; it felt like 15 minutes, a half-hour at the most.
These expansions and contractions of time’s pace are experiential phenomena familiar to all of us. Experiencing them reinforces my own intellectual suspicion that time is not real. It is not a “thing” we move through. It is that things are constantly happening, within our corpus and all around us, and we invent time to make sense of those happenings.
I was talking with a friend once. He is Scottish. We were bemoaning some of the kneejerk copyeditors we’d encountered, mostly in the United States, who as a matter of dogma immediately uproot any passive voice they find in manuscripts. I have trouble with extremism in any form. So boring, so uncreative. And anyway, the passive voice wasn’t conjured by evil wizards hellbent on corrupting the English language. It obviously exists for a reason, such as when you don’t know the identity of the sentence subject; or the sentence object is more important than the subject; or you’re just trying to write well and are tired of leading with the same subject over and over again.
But my friend didn’t encounter High Priest of the Active Voice copy editors as often when he published in Great Britain, he told me. Why not, I asked.
“Because Brits are just more comfortable with the fact that sometimes shit happens.”
Shit is indeed happening all the time. Sometimes we intentionally manifest it. But I would guess that about 99.9999% of all shit happens not because of subject-directed agency, but because everything is shit, and the great morass of shit is forever “happening.”
We humans, though, we like to make sense of things. Even little kids will seek out patterns, delighting in rhymes and repetition, constructing order from the blocks scattered on the floor.
All that near-infinite shit, forever happening. We can’t resist. There must be some logic to it, some discernible pattern, some picture amid the chaotic puzzle pieces.
Time grants us that. Much like God, perhaps, we create it, and in doing so, generate meaning and grant it to . . .
Just as I was about to finish the first draft of this essay, I was interrupted by the appearance of the mailman. It was mid-January and his blue uniform was complemented by a knit cap. I saw him through the glass patio door. Not mine, a friend’s whom I’m visiting in California and who was in the back bedroom napping after teaching a six hour course. This essay must have a beginning and an ending, even if we do not. So I got up, retrieved the mail, and thanked him. He did not hear me. Earbuds. I laid the mail on the table and sat back down.
. . . the infinite and the unknowable.
This post originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.