I
am one of those fortunate people who can look forward to the mail’s
coming. All of my nasty reminders—bills and
the like—usually come through email, where I can safely ignore them until I’m
ready to pay. I do get the usual junk,
but I also shell out annual sums to get fun things, too, magazines on topics
that range from writing to literature to politics to “mood-changings manis!” (Oh, Cosmo, one of my dearest guilty
pleasures.)
One
of my favorites, though, has been Lapham’s Quarterly, a very unique serial that
assembles not modern writing, or at least not only modern writing, but also
historical and classical pieces. The
editors there choose a topic—some of those I’ve yet to read are “foreigners”
and “swindle and fraud”, while in the past I’ve seen “comedy”, “arts and
literature”, and “the future”—that was a fun one. What I am reading now is "time."
Time
is a funny thing. You can think about it
any number of ways—as the movement of the hands on the clock, as the movement
of three-dimensional figures through a fourth dimension, as the weight that
hangs over your days, as the measure that gives them meaning—but no one really
knows what time is. An artist or poet
will tell you it is “what we want most, but what we use worst,”[1]
that it is “more valuable than money”[2]
and that it “waits for no man.”[3] Physicists
will tell you that it is a force just as any in nature, that it is influenced
by gravity (a clock on a high mountain will move faster than one at sea level)
and that smaller animals perceive time as moving more slowly than large
ones. Nancy Gibbs will tell you that it
is a magazine printed weekly offering world news and cultural information
(another of my subscriptions).
What
do I think? I’m not quite sure. Time, as are most things, is relative. We all know that a day spent at work seems to
go more slowly than our days off. Based
on that knowledge, I would say that time is something rooted in our own minds,
altered by the level of our interest in our surroundings. But if that were the case, wouldn’t
inanimate, unconscious things be unaffected by time? Yet the sea continues to pound away the
shore, and plants grow and die and grow again, and the world keeps on turning. So there’s more to time than just what we
think of it.
Is
time an illusion? Is everything actually
all happening at once, and we just aren’t aware of it? Am I just rambling because I don’t have
anything better to blog about today?
That last is most likely. But it’s
worth thinking about, since it seems to rule our entire lives. Whether we’re aware of it or not, whether we
know why or not, time is always moving.
The only way we can accept that is to find something worthwhile to fill
the hours before they fade.
