Kindle Notes & Highlights
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past … What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’
When I walked home from school on some warm afternoon, I was conscious that with each step taken a moment was receding behind me into the past, that the number of such moments a life had in it was finite and that the only way to preserve them in some way was to hold them in my mind; in memory. I would remember this moment,
I would say to myself; that way, it would not be entirely lost.
We post-war children knew in our bones that life was a provisional condition; that it could be cut arbitrarily; that its finitude was wrested briefly from death’s infinity.
These, to be sure, were powerful circumstances; but perhaps they suggest that our basic vision of time can be established quite early, and may be informed by the cultural and historical context we arrive into.
It was not only that time moved faster in America – it pressed onwards in more stressful ways. People worked much harder, of course; but also, it seemed to me, more anxiously.
everyone suffered from the stress of not doing enough, or the possibility of doing more, or at least feeling good and guilty about it. (This soon included myself.) It was as if anxiety were the tithe paid to the gods of the work ethic in lieu of more concrete sacrifices. After all, everything was at stake in American careers: big promotions, big money, big homes. And if you didn’t succeed in ‘making it’, as the colloquial phrase had it, you had only yourself to blame.
The different attitudes towards time, I gradually realised, required a different organisation not only of one’s
Filofax (the period’s time-management device of choice), but of the self and one’s internal arrangements.
A socioanthropological survey of the world’s major cities revealed that people walk fastest in London.
The British stance, their refusal to be agitated or harried, suggests that they are the lords of time and that they’ll be pressed by no man, or career incentive.
that cultural attitudes to time can have far-reaching implications for the ways we live, for forms of sensibility, and for the tenor and textures of experience. I suppose that, broadly speaking, what I had been observing in my own trajectory were the divergences between the cultures of fatalism, or acceptance; and those of will, or control.
It is the one dimension of experience we cannot leap out of, at least until the final act. But we can contemplate it, investigate it, get acquainted with its nature and workings. Indeed, the need for reflection, for making sense of our transient condition, is time’s
paradoxical gift to us, and possibly the best consolation for its ultimate power. Time gives us our existential premise, and coming to terms with it is equivalent to grappling with the great questions.
In jet travel we conflate night and day without regard to the twenty-four-hour cycle. We can, if we wish, repeat ‘summer’ or ‘winter’ several times a year. But even if we remain in one place we can function, via our communications technologies, simultaneously in every time zone on the globe. That means that any one instant contains our awareness of simultaneous events in different geographical and temporal
Our transactions with time affect us as crucially as any of the more familiar forces of, say, ideology or identity, and they have profound consequences for the quality of our lives and the deep processes of subjectivity.
Internal clocks are among the oldest features of living organisms, to be found even in the most primitive bacteria.
Indeed, it can perhaps be said that internal temporal organisation is a fundamental requirement, as well as symptom, of life.
In mammals the main ‘clock’ determining temporal behaviour has been found in a small cluster of paired cells located within the hypothalamus area of the brain known as the suprachiasmatic nuclei. (Interestingly, this is exactly the spot to which Buddhists point as the focus of contemplation, and which they call the ‘third eye’, because it is supposed to open in a state of enlightenment.)
Some of the causes of endemic sleep shortage have to do with the material conditions or requirements of our lives. Shift work, frequent long-distance travel, the availability of electric light and the incessant activity of cities all contribute to people getting less sleep. The work routines of upscale professionals often call for greatly extended or irregular hours. American medical students in their first year of hospital
Stockbrokers and financial advisers in, say, New York have to be awake during not only their own working day but those in London and Tokyo as well.
But perhaps the deeper clues to the prevalence of sleep pathologies are to be found in our attitudes to time. The hours spent sleeping are an interval in which we cannot ‘do’ anything, and nothing is seemingly accomplished; this, in our societies, is seen as either inefficient, vaguely
shameful or, at the very least, a sheer waste of time. Perhaps just as saliently, sleep ent...
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But sleep is not optional. It is a biological necessity, and its lack has socially measurable and sometimes dire costs.
What is perfectly clear, however, is that the lives of most organic creatures are circumscribed by definite temporal brackets; that all species are born, reproduce, and (unless they are killed first) die in strict sequence, and on pretty strict schedules.
But in this respect, Homo sapiens has been the great exception. Human life histories have never been as inextricably tied to biological life cycles as they are in other species.
If we want to make sense of our days, if we want to fill them with something more purposeful than mere existence, if we wrestle with our own significance and insignificance, that is because we are conscious of our own impermanence. Myth, religion and philosophy have arisen from the need to reckon with our awareness of mortality. We have created fables of the world’s origins, of the afterlife and of eternity in order to imagine measures of time larger than our own and to counteract the fears of our own ending.
If, however, we believe that we can exercise temporal omnipotence in the real; if we think we can manipulate time at our will, and reverse its consequences; if we refuse to acknowledge our mortality in some part of ourselves, then we risk – paradoxically – lessening the meaningfulness of our lives.
To be alive is to feel the passage of time, and to have time working through us in every cell, nerve ending and organ, as it takes us through its paces and plays in our bodies its mortal, vital tune.
But for all of us, time is to the mind what air is to the lungs: invisible, ubiquitous and absolutely necessary. Without it, our ability to perform mental acts would collapse, as lungs collapse without oxygen.
And it is hard to imagine any human act or endeavour that does not depend on the ability to conceive the existence of time beyond the immediate moment. We could not have intentions or decide to go out of the house, or build dwellings or voyage across the sea and savannah, without some projection into the future. We could not recognise ourselves each morning as the person we were yesterday without the mind’s constant reach into the past through memory. We could not even register the awareness of a fleeting moment without the perception of time’s fleet progress.
The body is subject to the workings of time; the mind recognises time, as well as being constituted by it. Still, what is this ethereal substance, and does it have substance in the first place? What is this thing called time? Does it actually exist and what is it made of? Can we know it in itself, or see it only as through a glass darkly? Such questions are among the oldest and most perennial subjects of philosophic speculation and wonder. It is impossible, and perhaps unnecessary, to give even an abbreviated guide to the philosophical concepts of time, but certainly thinkers from Aristotle to
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time has been considered, in philosophic terms, as one of the fundamental categories of experience, or reality; and one particularly concentrated burst of philosophic speculation on its subject came at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, from a school of philosophy known as phenomenology. If the propositions of the phenomenologists – Husserl, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger – still have resonance for us today, it is because they tried to analyse perceptions of time as a function of consciousness and subjectivity, rather than an absolute, objective reality.
In the twentieth century explorations of mental temporality shifted to the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, with their extremely close observations of human subjects; and in our own period, the cognitive aspects of consciousness have become largely the domain of neuroscience, where they are investigated with the help of upto-date scanning and imaging techniques and through direct probes into the central organ of perception: the brain.
For example there is mounting evidence that texting while doing something else – not only driving but crossing the street, for example – leads to a substantial incidence of
accidents. These, for obvious reasons, most often involve young people, and are sometimes fatal. In order to perform a task properly, or to complete a train of thought, we need to give it a proper amount of attentional energy and focus – which is tantamount to giving it time.
Researchers such as Joseph Glicksohn posit the existence of a ‘cognitive timer’ in which ‘time units’ accumulate at various subjective speeds. If
In states of extreme concentration, such as are achieved in meditation, the pulse of subjective time slows down considerably.
Our conception of time – of the present moment, the past and the future, and the links as well as the discontinuities between them – is initially formed by our own perceptual apparatus, and encoded in the amazing internal machinery which enables and constrains our cognition of the world. The elasticity and swiftness of mental processes is remarkable, but all of them have their neurologically inscribed parameters, and a pace which cannot be accelerated without loss of function or meaning. If we play a record at excessive speed, the sounds emanating from it do not add up to a melody or music. If
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Those of us who live in cultures where punctuality is highly valued also need to learn that if we do not want to be late for an appointment, we have to prepare and set out for it in time.
CF Nepali time!
This is a form of discipline, but also (in the time-observant cultures), a basic form of respect for the autonomous existence of others. Recognising that others’ time is valuable, that they have their
own arrangements and preferences, and that sometimes (or often) we have to accommodate to those preferences, even at the cost of our own, requires a realisation that we live in a shared temporal world, and an adjustment to a reality outside of ourselves.
In more extreme disorders, the connections between subjectivity and external time can be almost completely disrupted. In clinical depression, time becomes arrested in a hellish stasis, as the sufferer remains convinced that the anguish of this condition will go on for ever; that nothing can ever change.
In mania, on the other hand, time hurtles along at breakneck speeds, collapsing night and day – people in manic states are known for making middle-of-the-night phonecalls – and accelerating speech until words collide with each other, and sentences and sense crash.
The attempts to arrest time so as not to acknowledge loss, to evade it so as to avoid change, or to chop it up so as to avoid its flow, ultimately lead not to pleasure or self-preservation, but to the sufferings of psychosis or depression, or the loss of identity attendant on borderline personality disorders.
In the initial stages, a child’s sense of time develops through its relations with intimate others – adults who already embody within themselves certain patterns of temporality. Those patterns, in turn, reflect and are largely created by culture – that system of visible customs and invisible assumptions, unwritten codes and subterranean values which structures, even if we are not overtly aware of it, our perceptions and views of the world. In Western cultures, for example, it is an unwritten but widely understood rule that we need to learn how to show up for an appointment at a mutually agreed
time, or to arrive at work at a collectively designated hour.
In some South American tribes, people point ahead of themselves when referring to the past, reversing our sense that the past is somewhere behind us.
Every traveller through the less industrialised parts of the globe has been in rooms or offices where petitioners wait while nothing happens,
