Borderliners (34 page)

TWO

I
n Denmark, two libraries have extensive collec
tions of books on schools and education—the
libraries at the
Teacher Training College on Emdrup Road and at the
Danish In
stitute of Education, which I have
visited on a number of occasions.

I
have looked for books on the history of
education,
I
wanted to
see what they wrote about time.

I found next to nothing.
Next to
nothing.
Pedagogikens historia, Education and
Society in Modern Europe, Histoire mondiale de l'éducation, Schule und
Gesellschaft, Skolen i Danmark,
next to
nothing
on time.
And anything there might be amounts to facsimiles of timetables from previous
centuries. They look just like what you
have today, and they are not even commented on. Time
plays no great part in books on the history of education, in a way it is not
there at all.

In 1966, at the New York Academy of Sciences, a society was
formed for the purpose of studying time. It was given
the name of
the International Society for
the Study of Time. The society held its
first meeting in the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut in Ober-

wohlfach
, Dunkelwald, West Germany, in September 1969. G.
J. Whitrow was elected president; J. T. Fraser, secretary, and most
renowned theorists of time are
members.

As regards them it is quite clear that they are all on
the inside.
They are
doctors and scientists who have had no problems at school
but have grown up and flown out
into the world.

You
might wonder why, in the mid-sixties, an international so
ciety should be formed for the study of time; that
their first meeting
should be held in 1969, the year in which Biehl's
first applications
to the Ministry of
Education are written.

What you can be sure of is that this society is
comprised of people
who
were always most diligent and precise.

Not that I want to speak ill of anyone. But I have my
doubts as to how much such people can know about time.
Or
whether they
can only know a few specific
things about it.

You might well doubt whether, in this society, it has
ever made anyone ill.

And maybe you learn most about time if you have run up
against
it.
If you have been ill and out on the borderline.

Theorists of time are seldom in agreement. However, they do agree
that there are two possible ways
of viewing the passage of time:
that everything is in a state of constant and
unrecognizable change;
and that everything remains unchanged.

There
it
is,
the supreme contradiction.
Linear
time and circular
time.

Linear time has to be envisaged as a huge, endless knife blade
scraping its way across the
universe, and drawing it along with
it. In its wake it leaves an endless broad stripe of past
time, ahead
of it
lies the future, on the knife edge lies the present, in which we
live.

Circular time sees the world as remaining more or less the same.
With the changes
around us being, or leading to, repetition.

These two perceptions of time have been predominant
throughout history, up to our own century.
Where a modified
version of
linear time is now said, by the
experts, to be correct.

Both have been in existence for as long as the written word. Even
though, far back, the linear
theory is faint.

Far back there are the ancient
Egyptians. Biehl covered this civ
ilization
in world history, shortly after I came to the school. He
explained that it had been cruel but impressive;
that, like the Roman Empire and the city-state of Athens, it had fallen apart
when it grew
soft.

The
same applied to the Mesopotamian civilizations, which, in
Biehl's lessons, succeeded the Egyptian, but now
at a slightly higher
level. It was in
this way that civilizations succeeded one another, like children moving up a
class each year.

It was quite evident from the teaching at Biehl's that
these civi
lizations,
along with Buddhism and Taoism, were precursors to our
own time.

The experts still believe this.
Right from the
Guide to the History
of Chronology,
vols. 1-3,
published at the turn of the century, to
Whitrow's
Time in History
from 1988, it is quite clear that the
modern world's perception of time is far superior
to that of the
ancient world; that
the history of the perception of time is like a plant, that has grown slowly,
blossoming only in this century. Or like a progressive function only now
shooting up exponentially.

The experts have many different perceptions of time. But
all are
agreed on
how things stand with their own field. It has been one
long, linear triumph all the way
up to the present day and the In
ternational Society for the Study of Time.

I believe that virtually all of the existing books on time, deep down,
are
certain that it
is linear. That it passes and is then, irrevocably, gone.

Even with Bertrand Russell and Bergson, who have
suggested so
many
other ways of perceiving time, you can sense that they only
did it in jest. It has been like
a game of chess. They have wanted
to force their colleagues to play as well as possible.
But they per
sonally
have never been in doubt. Even Einstein—in whose curved space-time there is no
one time but a fluid diversity of times running
through the universe—even he can still write that,
in local terms,
time
is linear.

Maybe they are wrong. Not meaning to speak ill of anyone, but maybe they
are wrong.

I shall try to explain what I mean. In order to say it,
I must first
explain
in more detail what I mean by linear and cyclic time.

The life of every person possesses a linear trait. All of us are born,
grow up, live, and end up being destroyed.
In various ways, to be
sure—some
in holes in the ground, others in children's homes or at
the New York Academy of Sciences.
But for each of us, birth, death,
and growing up are unique events that come around
once, and once
only, and can never be
repeated—at any rate, not just like that.
Their time is linear. As if you were moving along a straight line—
each point you came past would be one you had
never passed before
and never would
that same point come again.

And yet life is full of repetition. Every day I install
myself in the
laboratory.
This is the prerequisite for the experiment. If it is ever
to be brought to a conclusion,
this act must be repeated a great
many times. In a way, time around the laboratory is
cyclic.

So, too, with the body.
Every second it dies a little,
while still
maintaining
and regenerating itself. With every second it ensures
the infinite regularity of breathing and pulse—rhythms
which can
still, at the same time, be
altered, increase, and culminate in fear
and panic and ecstasy, only once more to seek equilibrium. And
which now and then—when the woman and the child are
nearby,
or after working in the
laboratory, or for some other reason—for

fleeting
moments, can result in cycles of perfect harmony; one
steady, mathematically regular
swing.

In the life of every person, on every conceivable plane,
an unin
terrupted
chain of both cyclic and linear traits can be found; iden
tical reenactments and unique,
one-time occurrences.

There you have a contradiction in terms.

Read books about the history of
time and you will find all of
them agree that linear time triumphed along with Christianity. At
any rate, from Augustine onward,
Christ is most certainly dead,
once and for all. Our repenting must be done here and now, there are no
second chances,
time
is straight and irrevocable.

And yet Kant is the first to speculate on how the Milky
Way was created. And not until 1823 is an article stating that the universe is
not static taken seriously. Even
though linear time has triumphed, it is as though cyclic time is what counts.

This contradiction may have arisen because
historiographers
write
about other historiographers. In the learned world of medieval
Europe, in which most theories
survived intact and side by side from
the twelfth to the seventeenth century, time is linear.

While everyone else lived in a world
which
was, by and large, unchanging.

Thereafter, it has all come about in less than two hundred years. In
1865 Rudolf Clausius suggested the
word "entropy" as a scientific
term for the fact that time was linear, irrevocable,
irreversible, and
that
nothing could ever be the same again.

Up to that point, even in biology, no one had really been sure of
anything other than that living creatures kept on reproducing themselves; that
nature was cyclic. Darwin's book on the origin of spe
cies, on the survival of the
fittest, constitutes the decisive break with
the old way of thinking. After him, biological
time is linear.

Because Darwinism is what carried
the species forward, to
ward increasingly complex organisms—micromutations, passed on
through the normal process of
reproduction. What drove the world
forward was the unique, the exceptions,
the
micromutations.

The everyday occurrence of having children and feeding
them and
bringing
them up was nothing but a sort of vending machine for the norm, a beast of
burden for mutants of a higher order.

In many ways, all of this has somehow fallen apart. Modern biology
has had to consider the
significance of the learning
process,
it has become
impossible for it to explain everything, or even the greater part of it, by way
of unique mutations. And physics seems to have
gone quite to pieces, with no new theory lasting
more than a couple
of years. When I began
work at Odense University most people
believed
that the superstrings theory could provide the definitive
explanation of the secret of the universe. A year
and a half later,
when I had to stop
work, the theory was definitively out of fashion,
and already three-quarters abandoned. Today
Hawking refers to it
in
A Brief
History of Time
as a small parenthesis in the history of
physics.

Theories, therefore, enjoy ever-briefer life spans and most die with
out ever getting to grow up.

But not linear time.
In 150 years it has come to permeate everything. And
still, now, as I write this, there seems to be nothing
else.

Time at Biehl's Academy was absolutely
linear.

It is almost impossible to explain.
Because,
at the same time, every
day was the same.
Every school day was like all
the rest. Looking
back
at them, memory cannot distinguish between them.

Apart from those last months,
after I met Katarina and August,
and until we were separated forever. That time you can never
forget.