Cancer 36

Perhaps understandably, over the last few weeks I have been a little preoccupied by time. It all boils down to ‘How much time have I got?’ and ‘How much of that time will be good quality time?’

Philosophers and others have questioned what is meant by time for thousands of years. Immediately we are introduced to a problem regarding time. What does ‘thousands of years’ mean? We have an apparently simple answer; a year is how long it takes for the Earth to go round the sun, so it is the time taken for our planet to revolve around the sun thousands of times. That is a somewhat arbitrary figure. Why do we use the time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun? For time to exist we do need the relative motion of at least two objects, but why not choose the Earth and the Moon? Well, we do, that is a month. Why not choose the time it takes the Sun to revolve around the galaxy? Well, that is about 226 million years (that arbitrary figure again), so it means little in terms of our lifespans.

We don’t even get our measures right. We say a year is just over 365 days – and then we get the problem of defining a day, which is how long it takes for the Earth to rotate on its own axis. Immediately the definitions of days, months and years lack coherence because there is no logical relationship between them. The rotation of the Earth on its axis has little bearing on the rotation of the Moon around the Earth or the Earth around the sun.

There is a certain logic to the breakdown of the concept of day. It is split into 24 equal units, hours, which are themselves split into 60 equal units, minutes, which are themselves split into 60 equal units, seconds. But there is no good rationale for all this apart from the simplicity of fitting into degrees of a circle. Napoleon tried to recreate the calendar in decimal format, from the year to the second, but that didn’t work out too well!

As I have already said, time is measured by the relative motion of two or more bodies to each other, or in other words, the temporal distance between two events (which translates directly to the movement of the the two objects). We then measure this change and call it time. We find ways to measure it in ever more precise ways. Atomic clocks make use of Caesium atoms jumping from one energy level to another. They absorb microwaves with a frequency of 9,192, 631,700 cycles per second, which then defines the international standard for time.

Prior to the coming of the railways time throughout Britain was local. Midday was when the sun was highest in the sky. It was only when we needed accurate railway timetables that we introduced standard times across the country and then across the world (there we are, a benefit of the British Empire, standard times. The French tried to argue for a French standard but we beat them).

But does this notion of time make sense to us as people? Do we need that precision? Time is at least to some extent subjective. Sometimes I am bored and time passes slowly. Sometimes I feel it passes quickly. What is time to us as individuals? At the most fundamental level time is the period from when we are born to when we die, but as we are not really aware of time in the first few years that doesn’t count, but perhaps a lifespan should be a unit of one (or one hundred) and we could be aware of where we are in our lifespans. Unfortunately/fortunately we don’t usually know when we are going to die.

Subjectively, there is also the problem of time speeding up as we get older. As we age we have to remember longer periods of time, more summers, more winters, more events, and so with only a limited practical memory capacity these become foreshortened. The endless six week holidays of childhood are much longer than six weeks of summer to a 50 year old.

Another problem is that of past, present and future. It was Augustine (that very naughty man who decided later in life to become a good Christian and ended up a saint – there’s hope for all of us in the Catholic church!) who questioned this notion, and explored the idea of eternity. Why is it that the past stays in the mind as memory? Why is it that the notion of the present is so fleeting and cannot be captured? You are reading this but already the start of this sentence is in the past. Augustine argued that the present doesn’t exist because it is always moving, and so the only real time is eternal time. The problem is that we are not programmed to live forever and so time ends up as a great personal disappointment because we are aware of our mortality. Perhaps this is why man invented God.

Augustine has little to say about the future, unlike Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, where the main character is abducted by aliens whose experience of time is that it just exists, and so the aliens can transcend time, they live with the past, the present and the future all at the same time (same time?). Time can also go backwards. Vonnegut was trying to write about his experiences of the bombing of Dresden (he was a prisoner of war there) so at one point he has the bombs flying up to the bombers. The bombs then go back to the factories where they were built and the components eventually back to the metal ores from where they were originally mined.

Vonnegut made no claims to be a philosopher but he was still trying to understand time, just like we all do in our own ways. Another novellist who examined time was Milan Kundera in the Unbearable Lightness of Being. He focused on how all we have is now, the ever moving now, a little like Augustine. We are stuck in this ever moving now, so how do the past and the future relate to it? This leads to the key question of the meaning of existence. Kundera ends up with the Nietzschian argument about the essential meaninglessness of life, meaningless beause you cannot get out of the cycle of the the ever moving present. This is linked to an odd idea about the endless repetition of everything that has previously happened, which is where the argument starts to fall apart (and just shows what imaginations people have), but again we see this importance of exploring what is meant by time.

We live time as a directional process. We cannot live backwards though we can reflect on the past, but reflectiing on the past is not reliving the past. It is something older people do, or people who know they are coming towards the end of their time, reflecting on what has happened to them, reflecting on the important elements of life? I experienced this long ago with my PhD participants, men who had served during the Second World War. These were older people, and many of them were reflecting back on what they saw as the most important time of their lives, their experiences in the war. Perhaps people do this because they see they have little future, and that future time is unlikely to create significant new memories, and even if it did there would be no further time in which to reflect on them.

I am experiencing something of this. Over the last few weeks I have been reflecting back more than I usually do, perhaps for the same reasons as the Second World War veterans. I have no sense of Vonnegut’s aliens. I have no sense that I can see the future, the present and the past. I do have some idea of the eternal as Augustine might claim, a sort of eternal now. Not that it is making me believe in any god, not that it is spiritual in some way, it is just an attempt to try and understand the meaning of time to an individual. Why is it that we try and do this when it is unlikely there is going to be much more time to work out the problem (unless you are Einstein and you publish your main work on relativity as a young man)? In the end, Kundera’s idea of an ever moving now, drawing on the Nietzschian idea that life is essentially meaningless, makes most sense to me, simply because all my notions of time, including my now, including my memories, will all cease at the moment of death. The only human eternal is in the living individual who focuses on the now.