The Magical Qualities of Time
[image error]
What did time feel like to Sam and Esther living in a pit in the forest during the Holocaust?
I have thought quite a lot about this since Governor Inslee’s “stay at home order” of March 23. That was 39 days ago. I was staying at home for a week before that since Shlomo, my husband, had a direct contact with a Covid19 patient and was in quarantine. This time period has at once seemed like “forever” and like “no time at all.”
Many people have discussed how the days blend together and how “time” seems like a foreign idea, a friend from the past. Time has taken on a new quality that’s impossible to define. If time has become so distorted for us during this Covid19 crisis, I can only imagine what it felt like for Sam and Esther. They hid together, in and around the Stys family properties, for a year. Esther had already been there for some time when Sam escaped from Treblinka in August of 1943. What did that year hiding together feel like for them – forever or a minute?
[image error]
I got some insight into “time” over this past month, as I have been reading Thomas Mann’s, The Magic Mountain. One of the central themes of the book is time. The “hero” of the book is Hans Castorp, a young man who goes to a Tuberculosis Sanatorium in the Alps for a three-week visit with his cousin who is a patient there. When he arrives, his stay is scoffed at. “Three weeks were as good as nothing up here,” the narrator explains, “they had all told him that right off. The smallest unit of time here was the month.” (Mann 192)
The daily routine at the Sanatorium is the same: wake up; breakfast; walk in the mountains (“morning constitutional”); second breakfast; rest cure (laying in a lounge chair outside):, lunch; walk in the mountains (“afternoon constitutional”); rest cure; tea; etc. As each day went by, Hans Castorp began to lose sense of time. After Hans had “settled in” and had the schedule “down pat,” the reader receives this bit of philosophical wisdom:
“It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it ‘pass,’ by which we mean ‘shorten’ it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. . . . . What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony – uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling.” (Mann 122)
At the end of the three weeks, Hans Castorp is diagnosed with Tuberculosis himself and must stay on as a patient. The doctor orders that he remain in bed for four weeks. His experience as a bed-ridden Tuberculosis patient echoes what I have been reading in the paper about Covid19 patients in bed for days and weeks on end.
“[F]or now it is enough for us,” we are told, “to remind everyone how quickly a number of days, indeed a great number, can pass when one spends them as a patient in bed. It is always the same day – it just keeps repeating itself.” (Mann 217)
After Hans Castorp had been at the Sanatorium for a year and a quarter, his Uncle James came to visit, to get him to return home to “the flatlands.” Hans tells his Uncle that he was hoping for a total cure and that the doctors told him it would be another six months. “’My boy,’ his Uncle says exasperated, “’Have you gone completely crazy?’ A vacation was what it was, a good year and a quarter long, and now six months more! In G-d’s good name, a man didn’t have all that much time!” (Mann 509)
In reaction to his Uncle’s statements, “Hans Castorp laughed calmly and gazed briefly at the stars. Yes, time – as for human time, well, James would have to revise any ideas about time he had brought up here with him before they could discuss that topic.” (Mann 510)
Later in the book, we hear of a group of miners who were buried by a cave-in and remained in the dark until they were rescued. When asked how much time had passed, the miners said three days. In fact, it had been 10 days. “The phenomenon is possible,” the reader is told, “because we lack an internal organ for time, because, that is, if left on our own without external clues, we are totally incapable of even approximate reliability when estimating elapsed time. . . . One would think that in such an agonizing situation time would have had to have seemed longer to [the miners.] And yet it had shrunk to less than a third of its objective proportions.” (Mann 644)
[image error]
Coincidentally, I am listening to Ariana Neumann’s new book When Time Stopped. It’s a memoir in which the author researches and explores her father’s war time experiences in Prague and Berlin. While he was alive, her father barely spoke about his life in Europe. In her research, she discovers that at one point, her father hides, alone, in a dark, narrow space in his family’s paint factory. She connected a conversation that they had had, many years earlier, about his hobby of taking watches apart and putting them back together. The author asked her father why he was so interested in watches? “Sometimes you just feel that everything around you has come to an end,” her father told her, “you feel that you are completely alone. That time is frozen. And that you are invisible. . .. He explained that when he first felt this he had been isolated and afraid and had pried open his watch case to verify that time was indeed passing.” [Neumann Chapter 10]
So, here we are in our own version of “time.” I take some comfort in the words of Thomas Mann that time is not the same for all people and in all places. For Sam and Esther, the year in hiding together may have felt like ‘forever” or it may have felt like “a minute.” No way to know. They never discussed that feeling (that I know of). For Hans Castorp, time became something to contemplate and to let go of. Hans remained in the Sanatorium for seven years, only leaving because of the outbreak of World War I.
Until the “stay at home orders” are lifted, we shall remain in our time warp. Even then, no one knows when some semblance of “the old life” will be back. But these days at home, without our usual “external clues,” we must let go of old concepts of time and embrace the life we find ourselves living. Perhaps years from now, we will tell our friends and family that the time we had to stay home because of the Covid19 Pandemic flew by “in a twinkling.”
Stay safe and I wish a full recovery to those who are ill.
Sources:
Neumann, Ariana, When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains
Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain
