Time, as mysterious as life itself

Time, as mysterious as life itself

Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

Recently, I quoted on my blog something by the 17th-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián: “Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.” Later on, my friend Susan Balée posted a comment: “Odd how many of us want to “kill” this sole possession.”

All of which, not surprisingly, got me thinking about time, which is as mysterious as life itself. “What then is time?” Saint Augustine wondered. “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Of course, the reason time seems as mysterious as life is because the two seem practically the same. As Gracián points out, our life consists in nothing but the time that we have. Thus, to kill time is tantamount to killing oneself, not all at once, but piecemeal.

Oddly, we often feel most alive when we lose all sense of time. This may be the best argument in support of the idea that our being is grounded in eternity. The flip side, of course, is when one feels burdened by time. “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” laments Prufrock, capturing in a phrase the sense of life lived in daily dribs and drabs.

Genuine skill means being able to do something without having to think about it. The musician may beat time as he plays, but he does not think about it. He senses it — feels it. The actor is not aware of playing a role, for he has allowed his character to take possession of him. Are we perhaps, when aware of life in terms of time taking place, simply bad actors of our lives, slipping out of character, aware we are on stage speaking lines that are not our own, pretending to be someone else?

Only we are not, so far was we know, playing any assigned roles. At best, we are provided something like a set of chords, a kind of figured base, and expected to know how to proceed.

So to live is to improvise. But improvisation also goes well only if you become absorbed in it and cease to think about it.

Awareness of time usually makes us self-conscious, which in turn makes us awkward. And yet to live is to be reminded continually of time — more specifically, of time past. A garden fragrance wafts us suddenly away from here and now and plops us down in the middle of somewhere else long ago.

That is to be conscious of time in quite a different way. It seems to enhance our sense of being, not constrict it. “And it is all so sad and yet so sweet to muse upon the past” is how the composer Tchaikovsky put it.

Which leads me to suspect that there is a stupendous difference between time that is lived and a life that is timed. Rhythm — a pulse — can’t just be counted. It must be felt. No mere counting can discern whether my heart is racing out of fear or love or hate or joy or sorrow.

This disparity between knowing and doing something on the one hand and thinking about it on the other points to the gap between experience and theory — and by extension to any attempt either to quantify life or reduce it to one of its constituents. Reason is necessary to life, but that is no reason to think it is life’s governing principle. (See Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay “History Written by the Losers”.)

The thoughts we form of something or someone always fall short of the person or thing. Time as measured may be only a theoretical construct, the mental equivalent of a computer model, but missing the point, which is that we do not live our lives in order to process time, or reason, or impulse. Life at an optimum means reason, impulse and time working in consort.

So Gracián was not as precise as he might have been. We possess time for sure. It’s part of the portfolio of life. But life is a good deal more than how long it takes.