by Ed Simon
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is.
If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. —Augustine, Confessions (397)
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. —Richard Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922)
Twenty-six years ago, on a late-afternoon, late-summer sojourn down Liverpool’s Bold Street, a High Street of dark pubs and record stores, Donner kebab counters and chip shops, Frank accidentally walked into 1965. On his idyl perambulations to meet up with his wife at Waterstone’s, where she was grabbing a copy of Trainspotting, and Frank noticed a different slant of light, an alteration in the atmosphere, a variation in the sounds from the street, a drop in temperature. The summer odor of warm beer and fetid air replaced with the crispness of Christmas time. Approaching the bookstore, the Cranberries blaring on the music system, and mid-tune it’s replaced with a tinny radio playing a Herman’s Hermits number. Bold Street’s pedestrians were no longer wearing Oasis and Blur t-shirts, now they were men in boating jackets and mop tops, women in Halston dresses and pixie cuts. The road no longer paved, but cobblestoned. Frank noted that the Waterstone’s façade was now of a shop named “Cripps,” a woman’s clothing store that had been on this spot but closed decades before. Just as he crossed the threshold, and Cripps was abruptly transformed back into a bookstore. Misapprehension, misconception, misinterpretation? Hallucination or hoax? Vortex or ghosts? As paranormal writer Rodney Davies helpfully opines in Time Slips: Journeys into the Past and Future, “One theory state that past, present, and future are all one… But our limited consciousness can only experience time by being in what we know as ‘the present.’” Mayhap.
If you are the sort who absent-mindedly scrolls through accounts of the occult with dubious provenance, or as has spent innumerable hours listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast A.M., if you’ve ever heard of “John Titor” and wanted to believe, then you may already be familiar with Frank’s temporal flickering in the “Liverpool Time Slip.” Not the only such anomalies – there are accounts of tourists coming upon Marie Antoinette’s retinue while at Versailles and of guests in Cornish manor houses wandering into the seventeenth-century, backroad drivers in Arizona overtaken by futuristic vehicles and London streets destroyed by the Luftwaffe restored to pre-war completeness.
In Britain, such experiences are as common as blue historical plaques, the past as thick as globs of paint smeared across a canvas, so that an article in The Daily Mail by Flic Everett asks readers “Have you ever experienced a time slip?” with an email address to send in accounts. Whatever the veracity of such narratives, I’m irresistibly attracted to these kinds of stories. Not for the reason that many people read historical fiction or costume drama, not because I have any particular desire to traipse into the past. I’ve no sentimental desire to walk down a High Street filled with mods and rockers. I’m instead drawn to the sheer uncanniness of the story, not just its weirdness, but it’s unnerving, uneasy, uncomfortable eeriness. An eeriness that’s much more all-consuming than the already strange circumstances of finding yourself transported into the past, but the eeriness of time itself, its indefinable, inexorable flow. How it’s impossible to stall it or stop it, to speed it up or reverse it, except apparently when it isn’t. Time slip tales defamiliarize existence – in returning to the past, what we consume is an unbaked present. Frank’s tale so disquieting because of just how average everything is – in both time periods. Nineties shoppers coming out of Gregg’s with sausage rolls and copies of The Daily Mail, reading about Charles and Dianna’s divorce; their parents in 1965 picking up dinner at a fish shop and seeing headlines about sanctions against Rhodesia. None of that is strange, the only anomalous thing is Frank. To travel in time is to be a ghost among ghosts, it’s to remind us of how deeply odd the very existence of past, present, and future happens to be.
Whenever I think about grungy Frank in the Swinging Sixties, and what strikes me is how alien all of those people around him must have seemed, only by dint of his being out of time. That’s the reality of the thing, that everyone – and ourselves – are perennially alien anyhow, it just takes a bit of time travel to remind us of that score. Time travel narratives which most resonate – Harold Ramis’ classic movie Groundhog Day or Natasha Lyonne’s brilliant Russian Doll – don’t just present literal stories about the subject, but they evoke how otherworldly the world is, how deeply abnormal time is. “Despite its familiarity, time remains profoundly puzzling,” writes Huw Price in Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time. Price notes that the subject “puzzles contemporary physicists and philosophers who spend large amounts of it thinking about it, as well as countless reflective nonspecialists,” such as myself. Something which has bothered me for decades, that I neurotically perseverated on as early as the fifth grade, perhaps disturbed by the march of time after I reached an age with two digits in it. I distinctly remember that a few days before my tenth birthday, and I was disturbed – actually disturbed – that time just kept going forward. It seemed to me that I should have been able to stop it, or rewind it. That it kept surging forward, like an unstoppable tsunami forever deluging the past was bizarre, horrific. Theoretically space had no such prohibitions; you could go upstairs or downstairs, down the block or upstreet. But time was obstinate, this invisible thing that still weight and weft, texture and temperature. Not even a second transformed into the past could be returned. The past has passed, forever.
Impetus, I think, for my eccentric pandemic lock-down hobby of watching turn-of-the-century colorized point-of-view footage on YouTube, a cameraman ambulating down Market Street in San Francisco in 1906, or near Manhattan’s Union Square in 1911, or along the Seine in 1922. Whitmanian throngs of flat-capped boys and dapper straw-hatted men, women in bustle skirts and derby-hatted laborers, horse drawn carriages and the occasional slow automobile moving down Broadway underneath the rising Flatiron Building. Editors have added sound effects – engines, clopping, barking, and even though it’s simulated, there is an uneasy verisimilitude, the feeling that I’ve entered this extinct moment. Particularly poignant is the sheer fecundity of the second, all of those anonymous women and nameless men strolling down the Champs Elyse’s or Fifth Avenue, the sheer enormity of all of them that we will never know, never can know. What Annie Dillard describes in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters as being “prolonged and giddy… where very moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood… through a jugular vein.” Unutterable magnificence in the smallest divisions; to pause a fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond and contemplate all the detail that could never be recorded – the exact angle of motion for every branch of an oak rustled by the wind in a moonlit arboretum in Pennsylvania an April evening in 2004; every snippet of conversation uttered in a cavernous Glasgow pub on a dreary November night in 2007, the placement of every single iris in relation to every other iris in a Central Park flowerbed during a summer dusk in 2016. To record, perfectly, such time completely would surpass all of human knowledge, all of our computational ability. Only that abstracted myth called the present is able to make our lives comprehensible, otherwise we must approach the moment through poetry, a higher form of mathematics.
Physicist Alan Lightman writes in his gorgeous novella Einstein’s Dreams how “time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze… some cosmic disturbance will cause a rivulet of time to turn away from the mainstream, to make connection backstream. When this happens, birds, soil, people caught in the branching tributary find themselves suddenly carried to the past.” An evocation of all of those birds and soil, rivulets and streams; a flickering of the sheer overabundance of reality in each instant. That a lost second is infinite, underscores how our present is also rich, and just as fleeting as any in the past. A simulated version of the time slip, for watching those videos drawn from the archives of the Museum of Modern Art and posted onto the internet (for whom?) evokes a sense of what Frank must have felt, the way in which quietly fumbling in the curtains of history is a potent j’aime vous. The creeping sentiment that I got when, during my more crapulent pack rat days, I’d come across an old, yellowing copy of The New Yorker or Rolling Stone underneath a pile of old t-shirts, the futures their pundits tried to foresee now long past, the answer to who would win the Republican nomination in 2012 or the World Series in 2016 something of which I could now be certain, even while on the other side of that veil it remained conjecture. Flipping through a brittle, aging magazine is to enter a time slip, to journey into a past that’s literally inaccessible. Can you quite remember what the world itself felt like before Roe v. Wade was overturned? Before the pandemic? Before Trump?
Even more basic a metaphysical inquiry than “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is the question “Can you go home again?” Among the olive-grove and lemon-treed academies along the Aegean Sea, where philosophers contemplated time an abundance of that quality ago, and Heraclitus thought that you could never go home, while Parmenides maintained that you never left. The pre-Socratic philosophers were drawn to the same sorts of issues that so disturbed ten-year-old me. Why does time only move forward, like an arrow shot from Apollo’s bow? When the past disappears, where does it go to, and why can’t we go there? Did time have a beginning and does it have an end? Anthony Gottlieb writes in The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance how the pre-Socratic philosophers “tried to explain an apparently disordered world in terms of simpler and impersonal principles,” but as is the natural of great truths, their conclusions could often be diametrically opposed. For example, Heraclitus famously envisioned time as if it were the ever-flowing Lethe, that tributary of forgetfulness in which we are afflicted with amnesia over the strange predicament of existence itself, where each vortices, eddy, and whirlpool is in continual flux, past this or that river-polished stone or mossy log. “You cannot step into the same river twice,” as Plato quoted Heraclitus in the Cratylus, and it’s true of the Lethe, as well as the Hudson, the Charles, the Potomac, and the Ohio. Going to the same river is an illusion, for in a trillion attributes both perceived and not the water has flowed on and is not the same. “Everything changes, and nothing stays the same,” Heraclitus observes in The Cratylus. By contrast is Parmenides, who believed the cosmos to be stationary, a sturdy rock damming the Lethe.
Both men are ghosts and their utterances fragments – a few dozen linens of hexameter here, some stained papyri singed at Herculaneum there, the entire pre-Socratic corpus readable in a few hours of effort spent (understood is a different issue). And yet they’ve endured as pre-Socratic oppositions, tangled in antipathy. Ironically both saw illusion as reality’s most potent quality, for when Heraclitus spotted something as steady and regular as a river he intuited only chaos, but when Parmenides considered the randomness and disorganization of life, he detected eternity. Where the universe seems defined by variety, Parmenides argued that it was actually structured by a single, unchanging unity. “How could what is perish?” Parmenides asks in The Way of Truth. “How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown.” Between the two, Western understandings of time reached a détente, acknowledging the seeming contingency of our ever-variable lives, the wheel of fortune always turning, but behind that façade the unchanging realm of divinity where the past, future, and now exist in a never-ending present. Not to say that questions didn’t remain; issues of whether or not the future was unwritten or not, whether time was cyclical or linear. Most flummoxing, as concerns time, the subject always had a certain incompleteness about it.
As concerns the randomness of life, and our own agency in whether we dam the Lethe or not, there has always been disagreement on free will contrasted with determinism. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his thirteenth-century Summa Theologica, opined that “Man has free choice, or otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain,” a particularly masochistic Catholic vision. John Calvin, the stern and austere sixteenth-century reformer, writes in his 1536 The Institutes of Christian Religion that “All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God… nothing happens but what has knowingly and willingly decreed,” an exemplary sadistic Protestant perspective. Yet for both men, nothing is really random, nothing is left to chance, there are no coincidences. We’re actors in a divine play, and none of our words are freely uttered; the past is merely near the cover and the future towards the back, but all of those pages were printed at the beginning of time. The only difference is how much improvisation is allowed. Both Aquinas and Calvin’s God are in stark contrast to the beautiful Roman goddess Fortuna, ever fickle and capricious, where luck more than freedom or providence governs our lowly affairs – though the three often seem indistinguishable. Is the future itself written or not – that’s all the inquiry concerning free will and determinism is really about. But those aren’t the only metaphysical speculations that can be had about time; there’s also the issue of what its shape happens to be. A line or a corkscrew? Incline or a nautilus?
Traditionally, most Western philosophies have adhered to linear time; past, present, and future lined up like dominoes, with a distinct beginning and a definite end. Eastern philosophies – forgive me for how reductionist this is – have been more amenable to a cyclical history, regular like the tides but always changing. Friedrich Nietzsche, enfant terrible of philosophy, drew from pre-Socratic thought to consider cyclical time in a moral Gedankenexperiment. A demon appears in Nietzsche’s 1882 The Gay Science, and conjectures that this “life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you.” Every waiting for the Peter Pan Bus in the basement of Port Authority and every contemplation of Claude Monet’s The Water Pond in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, every Twitter doom scroll and every listen to John Cage’s Giant Steps, has happened before, before, before, and will occur again, again, again. Whether or not Nietzsche believed in eternal recurrence is irrelevant, for he was primarily interested in asking how fully we inhabit our lives, whether the demon’s news would cause us to curse or worship him. Nietzsche must have damned the demon that infamous winter night in 1889, when walking through Turin’s Piazza Carlo Alberto he saw a horse being whipped, ran to its defense, and collapsed in a fit of screaming. Total mental breakdown brought on by tertiary syphilis. The philosopher spent the next decade in a Piedmont sanitarium, variously thinking that he was Christ or Dionysius, before finally dying on the eve of the twentieth-century.
Even with all that is unknowable about time, there were certain conventions that held. Time was static – even if we changed, it was unchanging. Time was the blank canvas on which events were painted, but it had no depth of its own. Time was uniform, moving at an identical rate for everyone. Dawn, Noon, Dusk, and Midnight on Heaven as it is on Earth. All of this is verifiably wrong, but it wouldn’t be a philosopher who would liberate Chronos, but rather a physicist. Nietzsche’s fellow German Albert Einstein honeymooned just a province over in Lombardy on the pristine shores of Lake Como only three years after the philosopher’s demise. There, Einstein and his wife the Serbian physicist Mileva Maric spent their pillow talk wondering how much of time is simply a play of light. On their minds was the confusing result of an experiment to measure how electromagnetic radiation – light – was slowed down by the mysterious substance known as aether. Conducted in 1887 by Albert Michaelson and Edward Morley on the campus of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland of all places, that city directly leading to a revolution in space and time, energy and matter. What Michaelson and Morley concluded in their experiment – measuring the velocity of two rays of light, one going with the presumed direction of aether and one going against it – was that there was no mysterious substance permeating the universe. Light required no medium. Furthermore, in a vacuum light always travelled at the inconceivably fast speed of 186,000 feet per second. What Maric and Einstein realized, after days of sailing on the light dappled surface of Como – dinners of risotto and lamb, glasses of chianti and plates of tiramisu – was that the Michaelson-Morley Experiment implied that the speed of light in a vacuum was a constant, regardless of your frame of reference.
Imagine, Mileva may have said to Albert, propped up in their marital bed, that you’re on a bicycle traversing alongside Como, peddling a lackadaisical 10km an hour, when somebody overtakes you at 15km an hour. Now, in relation to somebody on the beach watching both of you go by, the second bike is going 15km an hour, but in relationship to the first bike, that second is going 5km according to the first bike’s frame of reference. Here, Mileva may have suggested, is the difference with light. No matter what your frame of reference, no matter what your velocity, the speed of light is constant, it’s always 186,000 miles per second. If you’re stationary, a photon’s speed is that 186,000 miles per second, but if you were somehow able to travel 185,000 miles per second, in relation to you the light wouldn’t be moving at a thousand miles a second, it would still be measured at 186,000 miles per second. So, Einstein would have asked, that means that the speed of light is a fundamental, absolute, invariant? That’s right, his wife would have answered. You can’t go faster than the speed of light, you can’t catch up to light in relation to its own velocity. This, however, has certain implications, because to maintain this divine prohibition, this cosmic speed limit, certain other affects come into play.
The faster something moves, the more its mass increases, even if this is imperceptible, though it becomes marked at high velocities. Such facilitation occurs as energy is converted into mass, hence Einstein’s celebrated formula. Amazingly, the quicker one moves, the slower time becomes. Not psychologically, not aesthetically, but literally. As with mass, it’s so subtle at the regular speeds we’re all used to that it makes little difference (though every time you fly, or drive, or run, or even walk a bit quickly you technically age infinitesimal nanoseconds slower). But the closer you’re able to propel yourself towards the speed of light, the more marked such relativistic time dilation would be. “Every reference-body,” wrote Einstein in Relativity: The Special and General Theory, “has its own particular time… there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event,” clarifying in an interview that “if matter and motion disappeared there would no longer be any space or time.” Light itself, having no mass, is blessed to exist in a timeless eternity. From the perspective of the sun dappling on Monet’s water lilies and the beautiful haze in a Sargent painting, there is no time at all. That which illuminates our world inhabits its own eternity, forever, by dint of her weightlessness.
Having first transubstantiated energy into mass, Einstein would suture the three spatial dimensions of height, width, and length with the single temporal one, resulting in what’s known as the spacetime continuum. A decade after his work on special relativity, and a year after he separated from his first wife (their son recalling that Einstein and Maric worked together), and the scientist would explain gravity. According to Einstein, space and time were seamlessly combined into a fabric that was equivalent with the universe. Gravity is commensurate with the curvature of this spacetime continuum, so that the more mass something has, the greater the resultant bend, and the slower time. All of this sounds abstract, and yet experiment and observation are the parents of scientific conclusion. Every mathematical prediction made by general relativity has verified it. Two expeditions were launched in 1919, one to torrid Brazil and the other sundry Madagascar, so as to see how extreme the bending of light was around the sun during a complete solar eclipse, and if these observations confirmed to Newton’s staid physics, or Einstein’s audacious version. The German was vindicated, and as a result it space and time were wed. “Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased,” writes Stephen Hawking in the great impress-people-who-see-you-reading-it-on-the-subway 80’s classic A Brief History of Time. Still true more than thirty years later, as bizarre as Einstein’s theory of general relativity may seem to our common sense.
Implications from general relativity are myriad, such as that time moves forward it’s the spacetime continuum itself moving outwards, from the initial birth of the universe in what’s called the Big Bang. This is the ur-process as rhapsodized by Italo Calvino in Cosmicomics, the great fabulist, hymn to modern physics, where he describes that initial “true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat.” General relativity also offered, at least on paper, the possibility of time travel. Special relativity countenanced travel into the future, though we’re always doing that anyhow. This is explained in the imagined twin paradox, where an astronaut propelled at high velocity into interstellar space will age less rapidly than her twin stuck in Riverside, Iowa, and that on the former’s return she will discover that her homebound younger sister is now an old woman. You could, theoretically, travel backwards in time according to special relativity, but that would require you to have less than no mass, the svelte condition of an imagined subatomic particle known as a tachyon. For the rest of us there’s a possibility of being able to make it to the old high school reunion by manipulating the origami folding of time described by general relativity. Perhaps by creating wormholes in spacetime, or sojourning to the past through the hellish portal of the singularity, or in using massive amounts of energy to “scrunch” the continuum and pass over it like a bridge to some far distant corner of the universe, beyond the prohibition against traveling faster than the speed of light. Numbers on paper seem to indicate that it’s possible to travel into the past, but unless the alien greys are time tourists, there seems to be little evidence of this.
Nonetheless, time travel speaks to that desire to slip the confines of history, to ignore the dictates of tyrannical entropy. Novels about time travel rectify that great injustice of aging, they allow for the possibility that there’s a reality where all the broken shards of the teacup gather together and fly back onto the table into a beautiful wholeness. “I am willing to wager that, given a random collection of middle-aged adults, at least three-quarters of them would respond enthusiastically when asked whether time travel interests them,” surmises Paul Nahin in Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. The Twilight Zone and Back to the Future trilogy appealing to regret and nostalgia. Whether or not the past is a foreign country, travel to centuries gone at least allows us to ruminate on difference and development. Cranky Mark Twain considered such things in his relatively late-career A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the story of a Nutmegger named Hank Morgan who is conked in the head and transported back to sixth-century Camelot, where he tries to use his homespun American ingenuity to marvel Merlin and pull the Britons out of the Dark Ages. A satire of chivalry from Thomas Malory to Walter Scott (the latter of whom Twain wisely blamed the American Civil War on), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is many things – paean to democracy, chastisement of religious superstition, and embodiment of the principle that “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Twain’s novel is a particular sort of time travel narrative, where through accumulated technological knowledge the modern is able to show how backwards the past really was (the better to root those enduring sentiments out of the present).
Henry Turtledove, undisputed master of alternative history science fiction, in his novel The United States of Atlantis, imagines how history would have progressed if the east coast were detached from North America, notes that a “horsefly can’t do a horse much real damage, but it can drive it wild anyhow,” while Robinson describes just how much depends not on fly, but rather a flea. Flies, fleas, and butterflies – so much depends on small creatures. History isn’t a science because none of her experiments are repeatable, but the counterfactual asks how big or how small something has to be to make a difference. Ray Bradbury in his classic “A Sound of Thunder” sees in the littlest events a magnification over history, where tiny incidences echo out in ways unexpected. By the middle of this century, in true American fashion, time travel has not only been invented, but monetized in the crassest and most disastrous ways possible. Time Safari Inc. propels paying customers millions of years back into the late Cretaceous where they “hunt” dinosaurs that were already on the verge of death, so as to minimize disruptions to history. While traipsing through the jungle in pursuit of his Tyrannosaurus Rex, a particularly fidgety hunter named Eckels stumbles off the approved path and smashes a butterfly. Upon returning to the year 2055, he discovers that a fascist candidate for the presidency who has lost in Eckels’ original timeline is instead welcoming the ticker tape and balloons of an electoral victory (Bradbury was off by a few decades). What the clumsy tourist has learned is that the smallest alteration to history can lead to disastrous consequences, where the destruction of “an exquisite thing, a small thing… could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time…. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?”
What Bradbury’s story describes is the not-great-man theory, where the seemingly inconsequential is invested with tremendous potential impact, though whether or not that happens to be the case must be as unknown as its opposite. There is a nice thematic congruence with Bradbury’s insect, intimating as it does the infamous “Butterfly Effect,” ever-so-popular when introduced to pop culture through Michael Crichton’s paperback beach read Jurassic Park, an integral part of the mathematical discipline known as chaos theory. Just as Einstein broke the the Newtonian framework, so too did chaos theory describe nature in a less linear way. Technically a mathematical model for being able to understand incredibly complex systems, chaos theory’s Butterfly Effect draws its name not from “A Sound of Thunder,” even though it concludes something very similar, but rather from the anecdote that says the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Peking can cause a thunderstorm in New York. It sounds ridiculous, and yet the reasoning is as unassailable as the example is arbitrary. James Gleick explains in Chaos: Making a New Science how for mathematicians analyzing meteorological data in the 60’s, “Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output,” something originally called by the less evocative name of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” but which became crucial in understanding how the flap of a butterfly’s wings – or a boot on a butterfly’s body – can have cascading effects, from a rainy Central Park afternoon to a fascist presidency. “Errors and uncertainties multiply,” writes Gleick, “cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies.” Flap, flap.
Whether or not so much depends on a pulverized insect, the story gives us the opportunity to entertain those untestable possibilities. Because all literature is a time travel story. Forging a past and manipulating a narrative teleology is by definition the art and science of fiddling with time. Time is made of second, minutes, hours; literature built from words, sentences, paragraphs. Not so different, and whether or not it’s in the “right” order (if there is even such a thing) it’s all at least in an order. Taking the spacetime continuum as “almost a metaphor,” and the narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin defined what he called the “chronotope” in a 1937 essay. Attempting to categorize how space and time work together in tandem throughout literature, and Bakhtin writes that “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible.” In other words, not every novel or poem, play or essay, takes place at the same time; not every one of them even has the same sense of time. Narratives can go fast or slow, they can perseverate on detail or they can sweep over scenes; a novel is capable of constructing a sweep of history or focusing on granular detail. Furthermore, fiction itself – literature itself – provides time travel opportunities. When Hilary Mantel describes sixteenth-century England, the court of Henry VIII, that realm of velvet and machination, silk and Machiavellianism, she generates a portal, a vortex, a wormhole to the kingdom of “hobs and boggarts who live in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods… the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nuns and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England.”
Mantel, while she is stupendously knowledgeable, can only transport us so much. The nature of fiction is that it is an artfully told lie, and that when done well it can perhaps gesture towards the truth. What the sun looked like as it shone through a smashed Coventry monastery at Midsomer, how the winter cardinals must have sounded in the cloistered stone garden of a country manor house to which some courtier has been rusticated, the sound of babbles from the kitchen in Hampton Court Palace as the servants assemble sweet meat pies and stuffed geese. I can guess what that stuff is like, but it’s incomplete, the transmission must have a bit of static. Accurate or not, the writer is still able to capture a moment of time, or at least to construct it (which isn’t so different). Nor does this moment need by extrinsic, it can be cavernously interior. Consider Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a 144-page book that’s about a man taking an escalator back to the office after his lunch break in Rochester, New York’s Midtown Plaza. Baker provides copious footnotes for every fleeting mental digression of his protagonist Howie, a richly detailed meditation on the interconnections between present and past in an almost excruciatingly mundane scenario. Take Baker’s incredible description of perforation, the “deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills of tuftlets on each new edge.” What’s demonstrated in The Mezzanine is the sheer abundance of events, the surfeit of detail in ever goddamn blessed moment. Does Baker actually capture every element of Howie’s thought as he ascends like Enoch to those upper floors? Obviously not, that would be impossible. What he does do is indicate just how supersaturated life is with detail, such immaculate, beautiful detail, forever washed away by the undertow of the always approaching future. Literature can’t preserve such moments, but it can at least give the illusion of that preservation, which might be enough. The brilliant French experimentalist George Perec tried something similar in Life: A User’s Manual, a novel which tells the story of an entire Parisian apartment block at the fictitious 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in the XVII arrondissement at exactly a minute before 8 A.M. on June 23, 1975, the entire richly detailed narrative only taking place in that instant. “We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?” writes Perec. His great obsession was to explain the universe in a moment; the failure is guaranteed, the trying is the purpose.
Chained to the illusions of causality, the fiction of a past which is gone and a future which has yet to arrive, and prose must forever enchant illusions we mistake for record. To try and capture time’s arrow is like picking up the ocean by thrusting two hands into the surf, as if you could capture a sunbeam by opening a jar during the heat of the day. Perec comes close by dispensing with the abandonment of the past and the belatedness of the future entirely, preferring to remain in the eternal present of the now, but fiction is less adept at doing this than lyric is. “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” writes Emily Dickinson in poem 591, among the most adept at the opening poetic line in all of our language, rivaled only be John Donne. “The Stillness in the Room/Was like the Stillness in the Air – /Between the Heaves of Storm.” Eerie in the manner that the Bard of Amherst often is, that sense that death really will be like that, the focusing on some mundane and yet visceral experience, the familiar drone of an insect (all those fleas, flies, and butterflies changing time and marking eternity again). What we focus on while in repose, as if prayer, as if final meditation. Whether a moment is your last or not, Dickinson focuses on exactitude, that distinctive “buzz” – the word itself is so perfect, such an evocation of a now. The wisdom of the poetry, as is true for all devotional verse, is that it returns you to William Blake’s inviolate axiom about seeing a “World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.” Every moment is a death because every moment passes. We are continually in the presence of all death, but at the same time there is no passing away since that’s all an obvious illusion.
Memento mori, that eloquent tradition of reminding us that we will die. That’s true, we will. Canvases of sumptuous flowers and bleached skulls, intricate pewter time-pieces and gleaming hour-glasses. Sonnets about bare-ruined choirs and crooked, leafless branches, snow-covered cloisters and moss-covered stones. What moves me in Dickinson’s understanding – which certainly is the understanding of memento mori – is how those moments pass away, but we’re also forever in this moment, how eternity is now. What she describes in poem 620, as “Forever – is composed of Nows – /’Tis not a different time – /Except for Infiniteness.” That seems right, certainly unassailable according to general relativity where the temporal just goes off from space into an x-axis, past and future j coordinates on the plane. It puts me into mind of the strange, talking brazen head constructed by the titular alchemists in Robert Greene’s 1588 play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay who announces that “Time is, time was, time is past” and then explodes. What a bizarre declaration, all the more so because “time” is rendered into the past tense, as if it no longer exists, but if that’s the case, than it never did. That’s my metaphysic, how I see the world. I’ve noted that in my own writing, I have a tendency to put everything into the present tense, as if the past itself doesn’t exist. Heraclitus and Parmenides and Friedrich Nietzsche and Milieva Maric and Albert Einstein and Ray Bradbury and Hilary Mantel and Emily Dickinson and whoever, whoever, whoever all talking and writing as if time itself didn’t exist, as the moments they inhabited never really passed but just exist somewhere else, in some other place. An eternal present, a never ending now, always accessible if you look hard enough. That’s where eternity differs from cheap immortality, the divergence between mere endurance and transcendence. Every second like a letter on a page or a note in a stanza, always available, always intrinsic. Our lives, our histories, our beings, just a palimpsest, words written over words but everything still visible with the right eye, to turn a corner in the present and to walk right into the past. Nothing is ever really gone, and no tones are sepia. You read and live in the now – as you have always done.