Someone handed me a flyer today. This was all I noticed:
Do you know that you will outlive the sun? Do you know that when the earth and the stars have all passed away, you will barely have begun your endless day? Once you are born, you will never cease to live. You will be alive eternally. Eternity has no end. This is a solemn and fearful truth. Where are you planning to spend it?
Right now, I'm in purgatory.
I'd rather go to hell than be in purgatory.
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
Time
An average human life (so tempting it is to point out at every opportunity) is less than a thousand months long. One third of those months are spent asleep, so a conscious human existence averages about six hundred months merely. A lifetime is thus a truly fleeting thing, lodged between a sleep and a forgetting; and there scarcely seems time to draw breath in it, before its last breath is drawn.
The first mystery of time, then, is how little of it anyone has. The second is how unimaginably vast time seems on either side of the mere moments humans manage to occupy. If the universe's history were compressed into an hour, the time that humankind has existed would barely fit into the last fractions of a split second of that hour. If humanity succeeds in extinguishing itself through ecological disaster or nuclear war, the spark of intelligent life that flared in this corner of the cosmos would be scarcely noticeable between the massive weights of time that stretched before and after it.
Is it possible to explain time? St Augustine put his finger on the nub of the difficulty when he said, 'If you tell me to meet you at such-and-such a time, I have no problem; but if you ask me what time is, I cannot answer.' As a bishop St Augustine should not, of course, have worried about time, which in theology is a minor matter, for the reason that the deity is eternal, and 'eternal' means 'outside time'; and since the deity and his eternal realm constitute ultimate reality, it follows that time is unreal. And one should not worry about what does not exist.
Unfortunately, the ill-defined nature of deity and eternity makes this a rather unpersuasive thought. Time is all too real, as its swift and ever-increasing pace testifies - to our dismay and eventual undoing.
Is there any point in trying to define time?
Perhaps not. It is one of those things that escapes direct attention, although it accompanies every deed and thought. It has a mysterious elasticity, passing at different speeds for different people, even for those engaged in the very same activity. For example: suppose we are at the cinema together; you are enjoying the film but I am not. Time will pass more swiftly for you than for me. Similar hours will be as nothing to a sleeper, yet will limp on leaden feet for one who watches over him.
This protean capacity of time is a significant matter for anyone who would live well. Consider: a weekend away from home in some beautiful, exciting or fascinating new place will feel like a lifetime while one is there, yet like a split second once one is home again. Both temporal judgements will capture something of the truth, which is that time is not something absolute and objective, ticking away in regular quanta, but is made of experience. Think of loitering at home for a week, doing nothing, and compare it with jumping on an aeroplane and visiting several exotic locations in the same space of days. More life gets packed into the latter than the former - more perceptions, more thoughts, more memories, a greater range of feelings; and it is these, not repetition and stasis, that measure life.
Some people use their energy to live many lifetimes in one lifetime. Others, through timidity or lack of imagination, use up a whole lifetime living less than one lifetime. These latter in effect eat their soup with a fork; they walk about with eyes shut, fingers in their ears, cotton wool in their noses. Not for them the vivid, pungent sensations of living along their pulses, experiencing everything at it's best.
That, for Walter Pater, is what a successful life is: 'A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life,' he wrote; 'how many we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
The injunction to live life to the full might better, as this insight suggests, be phrased: Live all the lifetimes you can.
The first mystery of time, then, is how little of it anyone has. The second is how unimaginably vast time seems on either side of the mere moments humans manage to occupy. If the universe's history were compressed into an hour, the time that humankind has existed would barely fit into the last fractions of a split second of that hour. If humanity succeeds in extinguishing itself through ecological disaster or nuclear war, the spark of intelligent life that flared in this corner of the cosmos would be scarcely noticeable between the massive weights of time that stretched before and after it.
Is it possible to explain time? St Augustine put his finger on the nub of the difficulty when he said, 'If you tell me to meet you at such-and-such a time, I have no problem; but if you ask me what time is, I cannot answer.' As a bishop St Augustine should not, of course, have worried about time, which in theology is a minor matter, for the reason that the deity is eternal, and 'eternal' means 'outside time'; and since the deity and his eternal realm constitute ultimate reality, it follows that time is unreal. And one should not worry about what does not exist.
Unfortunately, the ill-defined nature of deity and eternity makes this a rather unpersuasive thought. Time is all too real, as its swift and ever-increasing pace testifies - to our dismay and eventual undoing.
Is there any point in trying to define time?
Perhaps not. It is one of those things that escapes direct attention, although it accompanies every deed and thought. It has a mysterious elasticity, passing at different speeds for different people, even for those engaged in the very same activity. For example: suppose we are at the cinema together; you are enjoying the film but I am not. Time will pass more swiftly for you than for me. Similar hours will be as nothing to a sleeper, yet will limp on leaden feet for one who watches over him.
This protean capacity of time is a significant matter for anyone who would live well. Consider: a weekend away from home in some beautiful, exciting or fascinating new place will feel like a lifetime while one is there, yet like a split second once one is home again. Both temporal judgements will capture something of the truth, which is that time is not something absolute and objective, ticking away in regular quanta, but is made of experience. Think of loitering at home for a week, doing nothing, and compare it with jumping on an aeroplane and visiting several exotic locations in the same space of days. More life gets packed into the latter than the former - more perceptions, more thoughts, more memories, a greater range of feelings; and it is these, not repetition and stasis, that measure life.
Some people use their energy to live many lifetimes in one lifetime. Others, through timidity or lack of imagination, use up a whole lifetime living less than one lifetime. These latter in effect eat their soup with a fork; they walk about with eyes shut, fingers in their ears, cotton wool in their noses. Not for them the vivid, pungent sensations of living along their pulses, experiencing everything at it's best.
That, for Walter Pater, is what a successful life is: 'A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life,' he wrote; 'how many we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
The injunction to live life to the full might better, as this insight suggests, be phrased: Live all the lifetimes you can.
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