Soul of the World (11 page)

This morning the sky is perfectly clear and the ocean still. After breakfast I go searching for a reef and find one—a long streak of dark blue-green against the pale turquoise of the ocean—close to shore at the north end of the resort’s beach. It’s high tide, and the low swells are just cresting over the coral. I hurry back to my room, grab my snorkel and flippers, and within minutes I’m floating over paradise.

There are all my old friends—the sergeant major fish, the psychedelic parrotfish and serene schools of blue tangs. Like a crown jewel, a queen triggerfish swims by, its flagrantly tropical body adorned with electric-blue flashes. Below, the fantastic shapes of brain coral, staghorn coral and sea fans spike up. I can hear the reef tick, like an irregular clock, as the parrotfish and wrasse forage through the coral, picking at it with their beaks. This ubiquitous tinkling and clicking, like rolling cinders, seems a curiously dry noise for such a submerged world.

And everywhere there’s life, floating and profligate. In the sky above me, frigate birds drift, their own medium a blue fluid quicker than water. But it’s the wind and waves that stir it all. Occasionally the backwash from a big wave creates undertow that spills tangs, trumpetfish and gobies over the brain coral at the reef’s edge and into the blue depths beyond the drop-off. This spur-and-groove reef has been formed by thousands of years of waves, and the sand flats between the coral chimneys seem unchanged since the Devonian period. Everything, including me, rocks in slow circles with the waves, like riders on a bus swaying in unison with the curves of the road. We roll together in the subsurface squeeze and flow of swells, a confederacy of helpless, living jelly in the ocean.

After an hour or so I return to my room, lie down on my bed in the air-conditioned coolness. I can still feel the ocean swells in my body. I drift off. When I awake it’s just after four o’clock in the afternoon. I pull back the curtains and I know, as soon as I see the light on the yellow stucco walls of the adjacent building, that this is the time. Each island in the Caribbean has its own hour of eternity, a signal hour that epitomizes the endless summer of the tropics. In Bonaire it arrives around five or six in the afternoon, as the sun angles low. In Cozumel it happens later, just before sundown. On Cayo Largo I am surprised to see it arriving so early.

I go out onto the balcony, and the surging heat is another surprise. The sun is lower in the sky. The light is a slightly diminished tropical sunlight, the stunned opulence of permanent heat, that is tempered just enough to bring out the infinity of time locked in its beams. I see it most clearly in the shining highlights on the fronds of the coconut palms outside my second-floor balcony. Their improbably large pinnate leaves rustle in a vague breeze. Behind them, the ocean, the orange and yellow rustic villas and the infinite blue of the sky, holding a single frigate bird that hovers above the dunes, are like a picture of themselves. Time stands still for an hour, and in that brief, extravagant, all-encompassing eternity there is a humming abundancy, a poignancy that saturates the sunlight and the palms.

B
EYOND
T
IME

The idea of eternity has excited, terrified and inspired people since the beginning of civilization, and probably before that. Over the millennia we have discovered two kinds of eternity: one an endless period of time, an infinity; the other timelessness, a special state with no future
or past, only an infinite present. Of the two, the second must be closest to the real eternity, because if there is a past and a future, no matter how long their duration, there must also have been a beginning, and there must also be an end. Right now, our universe is still relatively young at 13.7 billion years, and you could argue that the lifespan of the universe might as well represent an eternity, since the ultimate length of its existence—billions upon billions of years—is beyond individual comprehension. We can know these numbers, but we cannot
feel
them the way we do a normal lifespan. As the old Jamaican saying goes, “Who feels it, knows it.” The longest time we can know in a human lifetime is a century, though the only centenarian of my acquaintance says she feels like she’s lived an eternity.

If we aren’t able to experience real eternity, at least the eternity of duration, we can at least experience more immediate eternities. In his
Tractatus Logico-philosophicus
, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” Like Zen monks do. When the owl enthralled me in March, I was so completely in the moment that I experienced a flash of what felt like Zen eternity. But not all experiences of infinitude are such revelations. There are banal eternities too—the red light that never turns green, the bank lineup where time stands still, the Internet download that doesn’t end. Although frustrating, and boring, these moments can be almost as intense an experience of time standing still as emotional epiphany is.

The mystic sense of time standing still is intrinsically more interesting and almost always more spiritual. In his 1929 Gifford Lecture, Ernest Barnes, an Anglican bishop and physicist, recounted a profound experience of eternity during a walk to a beach on the coast of England.
“I remember,” he said, “that I was going to bathe from a stretch of shingle to which the few people who stayed in the village seldom went. Suddenly the noise of the insects was hushed. Time seemed to stop. A sense of infinite power and peace came upon me. I can best liken the combination of timelessness with amazing fullness of existence to the feeling one gets in watching the rim of a great silent fly-wheel or the unmoving surface of a deep, strongly flowing river. Nothing happened: yet existence was completely full. All was clear.”

The crucial image in Barnes’s vision is his metaphor of the flywheel. Large, spoked iron wheels, often twenty feet in diameter and weighing several tons, flywheels were used to drive machinery in the industrial era. Their flat outer rims were so precisely machined that, if you ignored the whirring spokes, you saw hardly any difference between a moving flywheel and one that had stopped. Barnes’s metaphor is excellent, for you can touch the rim as it moves and feel the surface slipping by under your finger, as I once did on a public-school class trip to an industrial museum in Greenfield, Michigan. But he gives us another metaphor, just to nail it—this time, of a river. Again, immense power and movement with a deceptively calm surface. It is as if, standing still, he had witnessed the flow of time itself as it whirred past him.

Barnes’s experience of eternity is altogether different from the eternity of the monotheistic religions, most notably Christianity, which hold out the promise of an actual, durational eternity in an afterlife. Many religious writers have talked about this, though none so eruditely, to my mind at least, as Benedict Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher. According to Spinoza, who was a pantheist, “God and all the attributes of God are eternal.” He goes on to say that since we are one with God, “We feel and know that we are eternal.” His certainty came from philosophical
knowledge and spiritual conviction, though it is hard to say how literally he took the notion of eternity in an afterlife.

When I was young and had trouble getting to sleep, my mind would drift towards strangely cosmic themes. I would grow very anxious and claustrophobic when I thought about life and the fact that we die. I’d try to temper the idea of mortality with that of eternity, which was certainly preferable. But then I found myself imagining what it would be like to exist forever—unchanging, infinite existence would be just as intolerable—and I’d get existential agoraphobia, fear of wideopen spaces. Both alternatives seemed equally frightening. As Joseph Addison, the English essayist and poet, put it in 1713, “Eternity! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!”

Years later it occurred to me that there might be a solution—two solutions, in fact—to the potential agony of eternal existence. The first was to exist completely in the moment, unaware of past or future. That way, the prospect of an interminable infinity in front of you could be avoided. The other solution was to constantly transform yourself. If you gradually changed, becoming in effect someone else, then you could easily cope with eternal existence because you would be a series of different beings, none of them technically immortal. I would choose the first, though in daily life I manage to live it only in rare moments.

There is something of the eternal, also, in romantic love. At its heart it is immortal, and, like life itself, love seems confined by the limits of mortality—it can easily last a lifetime. As the English poet John Donne wrote, “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” In so much romantic art, music and literature, the abiding theme involves love that will last till the end of time, that will stay true forever. In
Antony and Cleopatra
, Shakespeare
evoked this theme when he wrote, “Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows bent.” It is as if the strength and purity of the lovers’ emotions transcended time itself—though time is both an ally and an enemy of lovers. When lovers are apart, the minutes crawl by, but when they finally unite, time takes on another aspect altogether—their sojourn in bliss is not measured by the clock. Eternity burnishes their bodies; it is the streaming pulse of their passion, their longing.

My week in Cayo Largo ended too quickly, even if time stood still for one enchanted hour every afternoon. And a week is hardly an eternity, though time
did
pass differently for me there, almost as if I were one of the relativistic twins. My seven-day idyll felt more like two weeks than one, so that on my return yesterday evening it seemed I had been away longer. But here’s the relativistic effect: I phoned my next-door neighbour who’d agreed to look after my house while I was away. “Are you back already?” he said. Obviously, for him, it seemed like less than a week had passed.

Apparently the formation of new memories does, in fact, alter our sense of the passage of time. Dinah Avni-Babad, a psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has studied the relationship between habit, memory and time and has found that in our routine existence we operate out of habit, as if we are on autopilot. Time passes more quickly for us because everything we do is repeated daily. We don’t form new memories. But new experiences form new memories that, from a subjective viewpoint, expand the sense of time. So if you want to live longer, or at least have the experience of it, you should shake up your routine. Get away if you can. I recommend Cayo Largo.

Late this afternoon I sat on my patio, enjoying the lushness of my garden. In the centre of my yard there’s a potted fan palm—a washingtonia—that’s too big for the house. I board it every winter at a greenhouse, and its return to my yard each spring is an occasion. Last month it was delivered by two men and a truck. The palm in its oversize terracotta pot instantly became, as it always does, the tropical focus of the yard. The tomato plants and basil were well started and the rhododendron was still flowering. The slanting sun spotlighted my new banana tree, which, according to a little label hung on one leaf, is a new species that is winter-hardy if it’s cut back and mulched. We’ll see. My yard is a small, tropical oasis that harks back to Cayo Largo, though I miss the saturated tropical sun and the late-afternoon peek into eternity.

And yet the yellow roses by my patio were blooming mightily and there was a poignancy to the late-afternoon sunlight. The rose blossoms. Above and behind them, plumed thunderheads glowed pink on the horizon, echoing the shapes of the oak trees. Eternal in its transience, infinite in its uniqueness, my garden was a still life, a tableau flooded with cosmic nostalgia. The partially opened rose and the other one that was already losing its petals…that particular scene would never occur again in the whole existence of the universe. It was bookended by eternity.

Time is at the heart of all that is important to human beings.

—
Bernard d’Espagnat

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

—
Karl Marx

J
ANUS OF
N
OW

This morning I had a claustrophobic experience, probably because my sense of time’s passage has been heightened lately. I’ve become disturbingly aware of how quickly the present recedes into the past. What happened was, I was listening to music on my computer and watching the cursor that shows what part of the song is playing, when it struck me that the cursor was a metaphor for my own existence. But with two big differences: I didn’t know how long my “music” would last, and I couldn’t click and drag my location in time forwards or backwards.
Then I realized there was another difference, and this is where my sense of claustrophobia was centred. “Now,” our personal black dot, is a fixative. Its trailing edge instantly freezes the movements of whatever action is surfing in from the future on the wave of the present. As narrow as “now” is—and it
is
narrow—it still has two sides, one closed, the other open. Its trailing side closes off all possibility of change, while its forward, future-facing edge allows
all
change. The universe and everything in it are like angels dancing on the head of this pin. All that moves—planets, butterflies, soccer games, dozing monkeys, ballerinas and aging wine—becomes instantly locked into permanent, sculptural history by the freezing action of the trailing edge of the past.

And then another possibility occurred to me and reversed all my notions about the direction of time. Maybe, I thought, the direction of the flow
isn’t
from the future into the past. What if “now,” the present moment, is a membrane pushed upwards on the surface of an expanding past, which, as it blossoms towards the future, crystallizes everything that occurs? Any way you look at it, it seems that movement is a miracle. There’s so little time in the present moment. How does anything happen at all if “now” is so fleeting, especially if it is so much less than we could possibly know?

St. Augustine pondered time mightily. He too, as we saw earlier, was preoccupied by the riddle of the present. In his
Confessions
, he wrote, “How can the past and future be when the past no longer is and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time but eternity.” Here again, eternity seems to flower out of the present, “every instant of time, a pin-prick of eternity,” as enlightened emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in
Meditations.
Still, it seems to me that “now” is a like a thin plane that
the future passes through, transforming as it flows past the present into the unmoving past. Or maybe “now” is more like an incredibly fast construction crew building a high-rise. As they climb into nothingness, they leave a concrete building behind. Or do they? From our perspective, riding along with the construction and confined only to the present, the building might as well disappear beneath us as it’s being constructed. The present is ready just in time, for a one-time-only use. We’ll never take the elevator down—or up, for that matter.

But if the past and the future exist at once, as the physicists say, then perhaps the present is only the illusion of movement, like a laser light show at a dance club. As the laser slices the smoke in cross-section, new, convoluted landscapes are revealed, the very same way that the future seems to unfold. It’s all very perplexing. Maybe I should adopt the English essayist Charles Lamb’s attitude. In a letter he sent to Thomas Manning on a cold winter day in January 1810, he wrote, “Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.”

Yesterday I decided to lie on a towel in my backyard and sunbathe. It was a hot, mid-July afternoon, and cicadas rasped their shimmering songs in the trees. I figured I’d sun myself for a half-hour, and, since I wanted to tan evenly, I knew I’d have to turn over at least once in that time, after fifteen minutes. But that would neglect my sides. If I divided the fifteen-minute periods in half, I would be able to devote equal time to my whole body. But here is where division of the hour into sixty minutes breaks down, since fifteen minutes cannot be divided evenly. Half of fifteen minutes is seven and a half minutes, and half of seven and a half minutes is three and three-quarters. I lay on my stomach pondering the math of this odd little corner of horology, when my
thoughts were derailed by a new vista—my view, just above the level of the grass, went along the length of the yard to the garage. I was in the world of insects.

A big blue dragonfly sunned itself on a rock to my left in the garden. I was close enough to see that its transparent wings were minutely interlaced with dark veins, like miniature stained-glass windows. Everywhere on the lawn, pollen-dusted bees were visiting clover flowers, and several iridescent green flies with impossibly long, angled legs, were sunning on blades of grass. I saw an ant carrying a winged seed twice its size. At the ant’s scale, the grass might as well have been a bamboo jungle. It tugged purposefully at its load and kept a remarkably straight path through the grass. Just then, a trio of small insects—flies or wasps, I couldn’t tell—flew over my head from behind me and zoomed at grass-tip level towards the garage. They were going so quickly I could barely track them, and it was only because they were flying down the axis of my perspective that I could see what they were up to. All three were tumbling through the air like miniature jet fighters. They hovered and plunged and dove at each other like tiny top guns as they rocketed forwards. The whole nimble flyover must have taken only half a second, and then they vanished.

To them I must have seemed as slow as an elephant or a beached whale, and I couldn’t help but imagine that their relative time frame was much, much faster than mine. Those flies seemed like aerial Femtonians. Whenever an animal is fast, you can bet that neurons, the communicative cells that make up our own nervous system and brain, are involved. Plants, which have no neurons, are some of the slowest organisms on the planet. Worms, with their basic nervous systems, are speed demons compared to plants, but arthropods, particularly insects, are very fast. In terms of manoeuvrability, speed and complexity, evolution hasn’t really improved too much on insects. Even the mongoose,
which can outrace the cobra’s strike, has difficulty snatching a fly out of the air.

If speed depends on neurons, then mammals must be the speediest animals of all. And in a way, they are. A cat may not have quicker reactions than a fly, but it uses its additional neurons to predict where the fly will go and intercepts it there. Mammals can be extraordinarily fast. A bat can fly through the whirling blades of a fan, and a cheetah can sprint at over sixty miles per hour. We humans are not as fast as cheetahs, or as agile as bats, but we don’t have to be. Our brains have the most effective concentration of neurons in the animal kingdom. There are other mammals with bigger brains and more neurons—elephants and dolphins, to name two—but human brains seem to be more efficiently interconnected. They allow us to think ahead, to take duration and speed one step faster. They allow us to collapse time.

We are beings who stand outside and within time. Time is our tool and our medium. No other living thing measures and calculates it so precisely as we do. Even before clocks, we knew, by observing the cyclical patterns of the seasons, exactly when to plant our crops, when to harvest, when to prepare for winter weather. By anticipating the future as well as holding on to our past with stories and monuments, we exist outside of the present moment, the moment in which most animals live out their lives. Despite the fact that some of the most spiritually enlightened religions on the planet admonish us to spend more time in the present moment, not existing in the present moment is an intrinsically human trait, at least since we have become technological. We use
time like a map; we can point to where we have been and we can plan where we are going. We are cartographers of time. Ever since the advent of language, storytellers have transported us to the past, and soothsayers, like reconnaissance scouts, have glimpsed the future.

But if we are creatures of time, we are also slaves to it. When we began to allocate time, time became an obstacle between us and our desires. Many of the tasks that we perform every day seem tedious because they take so much time. I never have enough of it. I’m always five minutes late for appointments, I’m continually juggling time between my children, friends, errands, chores and deadlines. To top it all off, lately I’ve been neglecting to put on my wristwatch. It feels like a slave-band, or like the radio anklets that prisoners on restricted parole have to wear. And there are always the tedious little routines that have to be repeated every day—dressing and undressing, opening and closing drawers, putting out and putting away dishes. I find flossing and brushing my teeth at the end of the evening a monumentally dreary business.

To rein in my impatience, I sometimes imagine a parallel life in a community on the edge of the Sahara Desert. There, I live in a small village where each day I have to trek an hour and a half in the hot sun to a water well. At the well I fill four five-gallon plastic containers and then carry them back at the ends of long poles perched on my shoulders. Many times along the way, I’m forced to put down the load and massage my aching shoulders. Compared to those three imagined hours spent on such a menial task, the actual five minutes I have to spend in a bank lineup seem like nothing.

Yet psychological studies of people of limited means living in Third World countries report them as being generally happier. How is it that a culture without all the time-saving devices we have—the washing
machines, acronyms, keyboard commands, dishwashers, time-sharing and multi-tasking—end up having more time for family and being more content? There’s a kind of law at work here, something like the law of income and spending: no matter how high your income, your spending will always rise to equal it. We use our time savers not to create leisure time but to fit in even more appointments, more cellphone calls, more résumé updates, more appointments, more professional-development seminars, more time spent listening to the menu options on automated phone services, scanning electronics manuals or downloading software upgrades, movies and music.

At a dinner party the other night, a friend told me that time seemed to be going faster. Things he used to have time for a couple of years ago were now rushed. “Time’s speeding up,” he said. I’ve experienced the same thing. Some days time is sluggish, other days it’s fast. But, of course, time can’t speed up or slow down, at least for us, here on planet earth. Certainly there are places in the universe where time is quicker or slower than the average, but here it’s pretty consistent. Anyway, even if time
were
faster or slower, we’d never know it because local time always flows at the same rate relative to itself. If time seemed to be going faster for my friend, it could only be because he was slowing down. I said to my friend, “It isn’t time speeding up, it’s us slowing down.”

William S. Burroughs, the American beat writer, would have disagreed with me. He claimed to have experienced a quantitative alteration of time in the mid-1950s, while he was in Tangiers writing
Naked Lunch.
Upon his arrival in Tangiers he rented an apartment, and by the middle of the first year he had fallen into a schedule that persisted throughout his time there. He rose late and had his breakfast, then
visited a few local shops to buy necessities and food. After stocking his apartment he had coffee or an early-afternoon drink at one of the many cafés in Tangiers. In the evenings he wrote. This routine was interrupted once a month by an afternoon visit to the American Express office, where Burroughs’ family stipend was waiting for him. He would get there well before the office closed to collect his money.

As the years passed, Burroughs claimed that he noticed a disturbing trend. Although his routine remained constant—he got up at the same time, he did his errands as usual—the afternoons seemed to go faster. This trend continued until, one day, he arrived at the American Express office and it was closed. Looking at his watch, he was amazed to see that it was already after 5:00 p.m. What had happened to the time? The leisurely pace of his afternoons had been taken from him. Increasingly, it seemed that he had to rush through his errands; he barely had time to shop before the stores closed. What was going on?

He came up with an ingenious explanation. He claimed that an alien civilization, whose sun was about to explode and destroy its home planet, had discovered a way of sucking time from other regions of the universe in order to buy more for itself. Looking deep into space, the aliens discovered earth, fat with excess time. They began siphoning off our hours just after Burroughs moved to Tangiers. No wonder his days felt shorter. (My guess is that his heroin addiction slowed him down a little, but you have to give him points for a great alibi.)

I have my own problems. Try as I might, I cannot get out of my house sooner than two hours after I wake up. Other people don’t need this much time, so I decided to write down my morning schedule and analyze why it takes me so long. I usually get up at 8:30 a.m., turn down
my sheets to air them, put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, then wash my face and shave. That takes twelve minutes. By 8:42 I’m downstairs. I open the blinds, look in the mailbox and go to the kitchen. Two minutes. Eight forty-four finds me drinking orange juice and putting away last night’s dishes. Now it’s 8:52. I listen to my phone messages. Three minutes, unless I have to answer one immediately.

For the next twelve minutes I prepare breakfast: a bowl of cereal with fresh slices of banana and mango. I also put coffee and some water into the coffee maker. But I don’t eat breakfast right away. I eat it after my exercises. At 9:06 I’m doing stretches and weights in the living room. Six minutes. Then I finish my juice, take some vitamins and go jogging. My route winds through a neighbourhood park and several blocks around my house. Fifteen minutes. At 9:32 I start the coffee maker, go upstairs, shower, wash my hair and dress. Eleven minutes. Back downstairs I start eating breakfast. Now it’s 9:44. After I pour a coffee it’s 9:52. Breakfast, unrushed, took eight minutes. I wash the dishes in four minutes flat.