Mystery. I always seem to have plenty of time to do what I need to do and what I want to do. Sometimes I find myself with too much time and I have to kill some. Yet all around me I hear people talking about not having enough time.
Category Archives: Weirdness of time
Ghosts of Old London Town rise again
On a sunny Monday morning about 16 years ago, I loitered on Clerkenwell Green, London waiting for the company I was doing business with to open. As I waited, I looked around at my little triangular slice of London, near Leather Lane, near the ditch carved by Farringdon Road, and suddenly the ghosts of the past rose up. The prostitutes of Old Street, the washerwomen, the families three to a room, the pickpockets, the eel-eaters, the rag and bone men, the dying inmates of the subterranean Middlesex prison, the poorhouse, the workhouse, all of it was with me in that little square, and for a brief 10 minutes before I hurried, gratefully, into the meeting, I lived with the certain knowledge that modernity was but the thinnest veneer.
On that day I was standing only metres from where Dickens had worked as a reporter, Sessions House in Clerkenwell Green. And it was Dickens’s world that suddenly leaked into mine. It was the London of the 1880s, the London of The Ripper, the London whose ghosts walk again in a series of photographs featured on one of the most amazing blogs I’ve ever come across, Spitalfields Life.
For anyone who’s wandered the streets of London, down Threadneedle Street and Cheapside, Poultry and Cloth Fair, Throgmorton and Old Jewry, these are photos to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
Click here to enjoy, A Room to Let in Old Aldgate.
Many thanks to James Bradley for the link.
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Living forwards from the future
Remember how a little while ago I was thinking about time? Well, I was saving up the absolute best bit. Not only is the best bit about time, it’s the best bit – my favourite, juiciest insight – from doing the Landmark Forum.
“The main presumption of existence,” according to Laurel Sheaf, a Landmark Forum Leader, “is that life is one thing after another.” We think that time is a
one-way, no return, take-your-lumps deal.
For example, we live our lives assuming that it’s our past – our education, our parents, our culture, our good and bad experiences, and so on – which determines who we are in the present.
We read the story of our lives in retrospect, as it were. “Oh, I’m no good at swimming,” we might say, “because my parents didn’t take me to lessons early enough.” Or, “I can’t speak in public because I embarrassed myself in school that day.” Or, “I’ll never have a happy marriage because my first one didn’t work out.”
And it doesn’t have to be “negative” experiences. For example, we might say something like, “I always make people laugh, ever since that day when I was at my best friend’s party and I told that joke that everyone loved.”
Laurel Sheaf quotes Tom Robbins on the point,
we become frozen in that glad ice, turning ourselves into living fossils for the remainder of our existence.
We automatically assume that our past is what determines who we are in the present. And yet, this is not the case. What determines who we are in the present is not our past; it is our future. It is the future we’re living into that determines who we are being in the present. As Laurel Sheaf says,
What inspires us, and what moves us, or what stops and defeats us, is essentially due to how we see the future in front of us.
For example, last week I made a decision to go to France in May on a long dreamt-of Grand Perfume Tour. Straightaway, I became someone who was excited at the prospect of a holiday, someone who was inspired at making something happen that was not going to happen, someone to whom it might matter on what days the International Perfume Museum in Grasse is open, someone who might suddenly notice an advertisement to visit the frankincense plantations in Oman on the way, someone who might start telling clients I’ll be unavailable in May, and so on. Yet on the day before I made that decision, I was none of these “someones.”
Sounds too simple, huh? Or wrong. Or dumb. Yet this is how existence works. So how is it that we don’t notice this normally? How is it we all seem to be under the same delusion that it’s the past (not the future) that determines who we are in the present? Well, that’s a story for another day, or for anyone who does the Landmark Forum.
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Real time
Here’s a great video by the designer, Maarten Baas, that brings together two ideas I’ve mentioned recently:
Here, Baas shows time made visible.
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For more information on Baas, see his site: http://www.maartenbaas.com.
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What happens when nothing happens
This is the hypothesis about time so far. We experience time speeding up as we get older because our experience of novelty decreases.
The novelty hypothesis also works for another clue about time’s weirdness. Our experience of time fluctuates. Within the general trend of speeding up, we experience “local” differences where one block of time is faster or slower than another block of time.
For example, Phil in his comment noted the difference we feel between time on holidays and time back home. Time on holidays feels like it’s fuller and longer than the comparable time back home. The hypothesis would say it’s due to the greater novelty on holiday.
Stefan Klein in his book, The Secret Pulse of Time, cites a case that adds to the hypothesis. It’s the case of Michel Siffre.
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In July 1962, Siffre, a young French geologist, descended into a cave in the Alps without a watch. Klein says:
He wanted to find out what happens when nothing happens for weeks on end ..
He set up a camp and a tent 142 yards down, and though he had a battery-operated lamp, he spent most of the time in complete darkness “sitting on a campstool.” He had a field telephone that he used to advise his support team about “when he got up, when he lay down … and how long he thought he had spent in the dark.”
Very quickly, Siffre “lost his orientation in time.” As he said afterwards:
When, for instance, I telephone the surface and indicate what time I think it is, thinking that only an hour has elapsed between my waking up and eating breakfast, it may well be that four or five hours have elapsed.
Klein says Siffre “was dismayed to realise that although the only thing he was still experiencing was the passage of time, this very experience was deceiving him.”
Siffre himself described it in his diary:
I feel motionless, but at the same time I feel as though I am being pulled along by the uninterrupted flow of time. I try to grab hold of it, but every evening I realise that I have failed.
By September 14, 1962 when Siffre was hauled to the surface by his team, he was exhausted and thoroughly disorientated. Although he had spent 61 days in the cave his last diary entry was dated August 20. Somehow he had lost 25 days.
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Siffre repeated his experiment several times after, and others did similar experiments. Each time they drew the same two conclusions:
- our bodies adhere to a strict biological timetable of between 24 and 26 hours, and this biological clock remains constant regardless of what’s happening or not happening
- we have a sense of inner time — a perception of “interval,” or what the philosopher Henri Bergson called “duration” – that relies on event or stimulation or novelty.
I think Siffre’s experiment also demonstrates a third conclusion about time.
By all accounts Siffre was “dismayed” at his inability to assess the speed of time passing. What I think upset him is what upsets most of us about time. Not so much that time is passing per se, but that it’s passing more quickly (or, if you’re a child, more slowly) than it should be passing. Clock time tells us one thing, and inner time tells us another. And it’s when the difference between these times is greatest that we feel distressed and used by time.
Thus, the hypothesis:
- we experience time speeding up as we get older because our experience of novelty decreases
- novelty also accounts for local variations in our experience of time, eg, that we experience holiday time as slower than “back home” time
- our perception of time is dismaying or distressing when there’s a big difference between clock time and inner time.
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Image: Siffre mistaking his scales for a clock
Dog year time
The thing that terrifies me about time is how it’s speeding up as I get older. Months pass like weeks, and weeks like weekends.
This is my second clue about time’s weirdness.
To talk to most people, this is a common experience.
Yet I did once find a man who didn’t have this experience. He was a former colleague, a man in his early 60s (much much older than me) and when I mentioned about time speeding up he just looked blank. He told me he didn’t know what I was talking about, and time was no different than when he was younger. I was amazed at this. Not only did he not experience time as speeding up, he acted as if he’d never heard of such a thing.
This still puzzles me. Perhaps he was joking? Only he wasn’t the joking type. And he didn’t budge an inch even when I went into my nosiest consultant mode and plied him with questions.
Why should I care? Because I want what he’s having, of course.
Only thing I can conclude about him is that he’s the exception that proves the rule. Or that he too is just part of time’s weirdness.
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Stefan Klein in his book, The Secret Pulse of Time, even has a chapter titled, “Seven years are like a moment: Why life speeds up as we grow older.” Too bad that like so many of the promisingly-titled chapters in his promisingly-titled book, he doesn’t actually supply the answer.
He raises the issues of novelty and memory and the degree to which a stretch of time is stimulating or not, but then he doesn’t take them anywhere. So I’m going to supply my own theory using his ingredients.
My theory is that we experience time speeding up as we get older because our experience of novelty decreases. When we’re young time feels slow because there are so many “firsts” to experience. Then as we grow older there are fewer and fewer “firsts”. We accumulate experience and knowledge, and thus have a bigger and bigger store against which to compare new situations and new people. The bigger the store of experience – or, to put it another way, the more memories we have — the less novel will those situations and people strike us.
At the same time, as we grow into adulthood, most of us, by reason of work and family and other obligations, adopt a routine that means we’re less and less exposed to novelty anyway.
So while our experience and memories pile up, our exposure to external novelty goes down.
And without fresh supplies of novelty – either internally derived or externally supplied — time starts to race ahead of us. Disappearing down some rabbit hole at an unseemly rate.
More anon …
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It’s the Romans wot did it
For the last few years I’ve begun to think that time is not what I think it is. I’ve been collecting a few clues, and in the next post or two I want to think out loud about them.
The first clue is a biggie. It’s that time meant an awful lot to Martin Heidegger, the king of ontology. Ontology is the study of Being (from the ancient Greek, te on meaning “to be” and logos meaning “study or knowledge”).
Following is a shockingly potted summary of Heidegger.
Mere metaphysics
Heidegger posited that the ontology of the last 2,000 years or so – the discussion of what it means for something to be – is not ontology at all. Rather, it’s something like “mere metaphysics,” and all such metaphysical discussions of Being fall into one of two categories:
- essentia: a discussion about the nature or character of a thing
- existentia: a discussion about the fact a thing exists.
In the first category would be all the speculations that focus on a thing’s form or material or composition or its extension in space as an explanation of what it means for that thing to be.
For example, we say a tree is a tree because it’s made of wood, rises out of the ground, has leaves, performs photosynthesis, etc. We look to its features, its nature, for an explanation of its being.
In recent science, a classic example of an essentialist conception of being would be the human genome project. Most if not all scientists, and most if not all laypersons, would assume we can now say that a human being is a human being and not, say, a frog, because we have 10,000 genomes (or whatever the number is) laid out in a certain pattern whereas a frog has only 9,999 genomes.
In the second category – existentia – is the metaphysical question par excellence according to Heidegger: why is there something rather than nothing? And various questions like that.
It’s the Romans wot did it
Heidegger sees himself as retrieving the question of the meaning of Being from underneath all this metaphysical blather of the past 2,000 years and restoring it to its rightful primacy. But what happened 2,000 years ago that buried the question?
The Romans is what. Yes. Heidegger’s unique explanation is that when the Romans colonised the ancient Greek world and attempted to latinise the ancient Greek language a whole former conception of Being was lost. The latinisation process bowdlerised, as it were, the ancient Greeks’ understanding of Being.
It corrupted it, flattened it, and ever since, we’ve been labouring under much impoverished ideas about what it means for something to be.
Pre-Socratic conception of Being
For Heidegger, the ancient Greeks — specifically, the pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides (c520 – c450 BCE) — enjoyed a completely different view of Being.
It had naught to do with essentia or existentia, but was something like an arising into presence, an arising and an abiding, a presencing. Yet so paltry is our latin-derived language, and so grooved and faded our grasp of Being, Heidegger believes the best we can do is to make an approach to this pre-Socratic conception of Being, and only then by using words in a strange and de-familiarised way.
Which is one of the reasons why his philosophy is so extraordinarily difficult to read.
Heidegger saw it as his mission to try to retrieve, even in an approximate way, this previous conception of Being.
Same or different?
The notion of retrieving a pre-Socratic idea of Being that is something like a presencing is a sort of composite view of what Heidegger was about over his long career. However, there were many sub-plots, and thousands of Heideggerean scholars have literally given their lives trying to discern which parts of Heidegger’s thought are consonant with which other parts; they’re forever playing a game that could be called “same or different?”
One of most pressing examples of this phenomenon is the question of whether the composite view of Heidegger’s mission is a corrective, maybe even a renunciation, of the view he announced in Being and Time in 1927 at the beginning of his great fame.
Being and Time
In Being and Time Heidegger announces first the neglect of the “question of the meaning of Being,” and second, that the “provisional” answer to the question is Time. That is, provisionally, what it means for something to be is Time. All of this by page 3.
The rest of the book is about testing this provisional answer; about attempting to come at the meaning of Being — at what it means for something to be — via Time. A planned second part of the book, which was never actually written, was to be an attempt to travel in the other direction: ie, to come at Time via Being.
The fact he never wrote this second part, and never again dealt so directly with Time as a kind of “horizon” of Being suggests to scholars that his views in the book were superseded.
Yet I think Time is still implied in many places in his later thinking.
For example, is not the pre-Socratic idea of Being as a kind of arising into presence, a presencing, an idea in which time is still implicated? Isn’t it suggestive of Being as an event, and is not an event a thing that occurs, and only occurs, within Time?
My view is that Time never really goes out of the picture for Heidegger, and his insight that Being and Time are implicated in a mutual relation is still sound, and intriguing to me for one.
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