Soul of the World (3 page)

Another interpretation of Zeno’s paradox is a little subtler, though it ends up having the same bearing on our dilemma. The contemporary philosopher N. A. Routledge explains: “If, says Zeno, everything is either at rest or moving when it occupies space equal to itself, while the object moved is in the instant, the moving arrow is unmoved.” It’s really more of a mental exercise, I suppose. The first version of the paradox depends on time being infinitely divisible, the second depends on there being “instants” or “nows” in time that are fixed. It all seems very abstract. After all, we know that arrows eventually hit their targets. But Zeno does have a point. He was trying to show how common sense could be confounded by logic, and his paradox serves to ask two questions. Is space infinitely divisible? And is time infinitely divisible as well? We know that physicists keep dividing time into smaller and smaller measurable units, so, in that sense, perhaps time is infinitely divisible. Zeno also suggested that if time were not infinitely divisible, if it were instead made of measurable units like David Finkelstein’s “chronons” linked together in a series, then the arrow could be said to be not moving at all when it was temporarily frozen in one of those moments.

Certainly Zeno’s Arrow is not time’s arrow, yet in an important sense they are one and the same. They both reflect the nature of time. But time is a wind that blows from a direction not marked by compasses or wind vanes, neither up nor down nor forth nor back. In fact, according
to Paul Davies, the Australian theoretical physicist and science author, our perception of time as flowing like a river is mistaken. Time simply
is.
In his book
About Time
, he explains that contemporary physicists see the universe as a four-dimensional “timescape,” where all time—past, present and future—exists at once. But even Davies has to admit that the physicists who study time see a clear bias in it, which they refer to as a “conspicuous asymmetry between past and future directions along the time axis.” In other words, objects travelling through time don’t seem to be able to move from the future towards the past. In a sadder, more ordinary sense, what’s done is done.

This “asymmetry” is most clearly revealed by the second law of thermodynamics, which predicts that disorder increases in a finite universe. A broken wineglass will not reassemble itself. The parking ticket, once written out, cannot be revoked. (Indeed, the parking cop may be the modern embodiment of time’s bureaucratic linearity.) And besides, regardless of the abstract and theoretical notions of physicists, our lives are completely ruled by the direction of time’s arrow. The inmate on death row does not live in an atemporal “timescape”; for him the clock ticks implacably onwards. And for all of us, the wind of time blows only one way.

Other scientists and philosophers have written about the flow of time as a liquid. Igor D. Novikov, the Russian physicist, called his book
The River of Time
, harking back to Heraclitus’s famous dictum that you can never step in the same river twice. Time flows on like water, like the temporary river my street became a few days ago. As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his
Meditations
, “Time is like a river made up of events, and its current is strong; no sooner does anything appear than it is swept away, and another comes in its place, and will be swept away too.” The British poet Matthew Arnold, in his book
The Future
, concurred with Aurelius:

A wanderer is man from his birth.

He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time.

But if we look at time as the physicists do, it makes more sense to think of time as an ocean. We and everything else in the universe float, or bob, in this fluid medium. The present, past and future are merely drifting currents.

Authors have also independently discovered the idea of time as an ocean. In her novel
Marya
, Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “Time is the element in which we exist…We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.” Tim Winton, an Australian novelist, offers an extraordinary physical description of time in his recent book of stories called
The Turning
: “Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it…The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.”

T
HE
I
NNER
T
IMESCAPE

Things are never over. Could it be that we each exist in our own private timescape, in which the past surges through us? Sometimes it flows silently, unseen and unfelt. Other times we become aware of this buried current animating our lives.

Two mornings ago there was a break in the rain. The sun shone through the clouds, so I sat out on my patio to have a coffee after breakfast. It was a meditative moment, and as I surveyed the yard my
mind’s eye turned inward. When it did, it seemed to ricochet all over time—past, present and future. Sipping my coffee and looking at the bamboo leaves reminded me of a vacation I took years ago, the way the coconut palms shone like green vinyl in the bright sunlight. Then the phone rang and I was right back in the present moment. It was a friend. She was making plans for a dinner party on the weekend, could I attend? I went inside and looked at my calendar and realized that yes, I would be free that night. The buzzer of my toaster oven interrupted our conversation. A croissant I’d put in to warm ten minutes earlier was now ready, like a time capsule from myself. Without missing a beat, I went from past to present to future and back again. I was free, at least in my mind, to go anywhere within my personal timescape at will.

It is our ability to time-travel like this, within our minds, that makes us the creatures we are. Without this ability there would be no art, no dreams, no cities or buildings. Everything we have accomplished began as an imagining set in a hoped-for future. The Parthenon was once an inkling in Pericles’s imagination. Yet at the same time we are the inheritors of a grand history, and an even grander prehistory. These have provided us with the resources and the prototypes upon which to build our “now.” History is the podium of the present.

A G
HOST
C
REEK

It was as if the spirits of the rain were fleeing the earth, smoked out by the first sun in days. “
Après le déluge
,” as Rimbaud put it. The wet lawns and pavement and gardens and houses steamed in the hot April sunlight. I came out to look at the spectacle. Eddies of mist curled languorously up roofs and into the sky. Shreds of fog were caught like wispy cotton in
tree branches. A remarkable silence amplified small noises—water dripping from an overflowing eavestrough, the song of a migratory warbler in someone’s yard. The sun poured through the gossamer architecture of the pillars of mist as if through a cathedral window.

Across the street I saw my neighbour George, standing like an icon in front of his white clapboard house, staring at his yard. I often saw him there, tending his perfect lawn or clipping his juniper bushes. During a conversation a year before, he had told me that he had lived his whole life within the same three blocks. He was born more than eighty years ago “one street over” and had lived in various nearby apartments and houses for almost a century. Time had congealed in his person, though he was still strong and tall and unstooped.

I called out hello and George waved and walked across the street towards me. He was wearing a blue nylon jacket and a baseball cap. With his close-cropped white hair and all-weather tan he looked like the groundskeeper for an exclusive golf course. We watched the mist rise and talked about the recent rains. George asked if my basement was wet and I told him no, fortunately, it was completely dry. He said that the house next to his had a wet basement, and so did the house two doors down from me. “Over the years,” he said, “I heard about other wet basements and realized that they’re all connected in a line. A meandering line.” He gestured. “Must be the path of an old creek they filled in to build this neighborhood.”

We talked some more and then he went back to meditating on his lawn while I walked around my house into the backyard. It was mid-afternoon, and my mist-enshrouded lawn glowed emerald in the sunlight. I looked down the row of neighbours’ yards to the east and noticed that the buds on the trees were beginning to swell. Then I imagined what it might have looked like 120 years ago, before there were any houses. I imagined the small creek high with rainwater, the
green bulrushes and willows and cedar growing along its banks. A great blue heron stilting the shallows.

A river is more like a living thing than a cliff is, or a valley. It moves and changes and adapts. And from what George told me, it seems that even a river that has been filled in for a hundred years still has a soul, a slim, insistent thread of linked water molecules that continues to flow towards the lake. Here in the present, that lost, unnamed stream is more like a ghost creek that lingers underground. It is like time past, silently flowing through our lives even when we can’t detect it. The only evidence of its existence is a string of wet basements. My house must have been close to the bank of that extinct creek.

I began to think about how to resurrect the creek. I could hand-deliver flyers that would convince my neighbours to join in my project, the world’s first reconstitution of a lost creek. I went through my arguments. I decided I would target the neighbours with wet basements first. If we gave the river a course, I would argue, if, instead of fighting it, we acknowledged it, perhaps we’d be able to dry their basements out. Then I would explain my plan.

We would let the creek run through a special series of underground conduits, an interconnected system of glass pipes and sealed basement aquariums. Once the flow had been re-established, we could restock it with a limited but viable ecology of small fish and underwater plants. It would be a fine diversion, on a midwinter’s night, to watch minnowsized sticklebacks building their little stone nests in a basement aquarium under artificial light or to watch a dragonfly larva drift with the slow current through one side of the basement and out the other.

A crimson cardinal landed in my magnolia tree and startled me out of my reverie with his swooping, ricocheting call. I realized that this erstwhile creek will probably never run again. It struck me as a dubious engineering accomplishment—we stop up rivers that have flowed
for thousands of years in order to fill them in and extirpate them for all time, burying any evidence of their existence under buildings and concrete. I thought about my plan to reconstitute the ghost creek and realized that the plan itself, the idea of it, was already acquiring a history and moving into the past.

How quickly the present slips into history.

Even my thoughts have a past, even my thoughts cleave to time’s arrow. Or do they? Isn’t the ghost creek alive in my imagination? There is a second world, the past animated by memory, that lives in my mind. With my inner eye, I can see every brick of my house, the shape of every boulder of ornamental limestone in my garden, the leathery green leaves of my rhododendrons. I can walk to the virtual garage, open the virtual door and get into my car. I can revisit the garage as it looked after last year’s blizzard, the snow piled on the roof, the delicate etchings of frost on the inside of the windows.

I can move in and out of the flow of time at will. And this is how I, we, keep from being marooned in the present, locked into time’s one-way flow. Our memory and imagination allow us to reconstitute the past, to resurrect it, to point time’s arrow in any direction we please. The only place in the universe immune to time’s tyranny is our mind. That is how we escape being devoured by time. We can see the world from almost any viewpoint, we can imagine what it is like to be an eagle or a dolphin or a bat or a butterfly. We can even become time itself. As Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his essay “A New Refutation of Time,” “Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” Our mortal triumph is our ability to escape time’s arrow. We are chrononauts who swim through time in any and all directions and are thus unlike anything else on the planet.

Confound him, too,

Who in this place set up a sundial,

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

Into small portions

—
Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254-184
B.C.
)

Any day now the leaves will open. April is almost over, and the twigs on the horse chestnut tree on my neighbour’s lawn look like bronze sceptres—a fat, shiny bud crowning each tip. Every morning I walk to the corner grocery store on some concocted errand—milk, oranges, cheese, anything I can think of—in order to scan the maple trees in my neighbourhood. Their yellow-green flowers have already opened, and from a distance their crowns are misty chartreuse. But the leaves are not out yet, though I know that once the flowers open, the leaves can’t be far behind. Each floret is like the ripcord on a tiny parachute; once pulled, a leaf will blossom out after it. So I shade my eyes from the spring sun and search for the first green leaves.

For the past few decades I have marked down the exact day the leaves emerged. Last year it was April 29. The year before, it was May 7. The earliest, since I’ve been keeping track, was April 14. The latest was
May 8. It’s always a bit of a roller-coaster ride; winter relinquishes spring unwillingly, it holds on. If a cold front arrives, the entire leaf-opening spectacle is delayed, sometimes for weeks. Forsythia bushes are suspended in perpetual yellow bloom like flowers in a florist’s cooler; magnolia blossoms can be transfixed for two weeks.

Two years ago, when the leaves opened late, I became impatient. I had an impulse to drive south to meet the advancing wave of spring. It was stalled somewhere and I wanted to get to it. About a decade before, I had raced the springtide from Miami to Toronto in an Oldsmobile. It was late February but spring was well underway in southern Georgia, warm enough for me to sleep in the car at a pull-off with the windows rolled down. Outside the car, the leaves had already opened and the night air was filled with the sound of trilling frogs. It felt more like late May in Toronto. The next day I had a slice of homemade pecan pie for breakfast and then continued north, through Georgia and Tennessee, turning back the calendar of spring from May to April to March. As I drove through the southern Appalachian mountains, banded with pink and blue limestone strata like layer cakes, I noticed the thinning of spring’s greenery and by the time I reached Kentucky the buds had only just begun to swell on the trees, while snow still nestled in the roadside hollows. I spent the night at a motel in coal country. The next morning dawned cold, and midway through Ohio snow began to fall. By the time I reached the Canadian border a blizzard was in progress. I’d left summer a thousand miles behind me.

Y
EARS

The shock wave of spring spreads northwards at sixteen miles a day, a little more than half a mile an hour. You could easily outwalk spring; it
takes months to get from Miami to Toronto. Spring’s advance is really the tilt of the earth—fifteen degrees—translated into movement as our planet circles the sun. Starting in late December and accelerating after March 21, the northern hemisphere of the earth begins tipping towards the sun like a sun worshipper on a beach. The sun rises a little higher in the sky each day, pulling the tide of spring behind it like the wedding train of Venus. It’s so dependable you could set your watch by it.

Even without a calendar to guide me I know that my “leaf clock” is accurate to within three weeks, at least for Toronto. I’m like the early humans who had no calendars or clocks. They looked for signs: the arrival or departure of migratory birds, the blooming or seeding of plants. And there’s a lot of redundancy in the natural calendar—it’s no problem when the signs are delayed. Here in Toronto if the night-hawks are late, the fiddlehead ferns will still unfurl like clockwork. If there’s a cold snap that delays the leaf opening by a week or two, the first swallowtail butterfly will always be on schedule some warm May afternoon. These are backups.

The sun is more precise. If I jam a piece of wood in a crevice on a large, flat rock so tightly that even winter storms can’t budge it, I’ve built a solar observatory. I can use it to measure the length of the noon-hour shadow and mark it out with scratches on the rock throughout the year. Although the distance between one day and the next is minimal, if I wait for twenty-nine days, one lunar cycle, there is a measurable difference where the noon shadow of the stick ends. This is the beginning of astronomy. Every summer solstice the shadow will land in exactly the same place. From here it is a hop to Stonehenge, Egyptian pyramids and Galileo. But I’m getting ahead of myself. A year is easy to measure by this method, even in the tropics, where eternity lingers in the seasonless months.

M
ONTHS
,
WEEKS
, D
AYS AND
H
OURS

Yesterday, the first of May, the leaves opened. It was hot in the afternoon, and everyone seemed to be out walking—young mothers with rubber-wheeled strollers, kids on noisy skateboards and old couples walking arm in arm. The warm wind had a buoyancy to it, a softness tempered by the moist air, and it felt as if the whole city had been secretly towed overnight to the Caribbean. I spent the afternoon weeding and resetting the frost-jumbled bricks that divide my garden from the lawn. I also took my outdoor table and chairs out of the garage, wiped off the winter grit and set them up on the patio. It was good to be out in the sun.

The evening continued warm, and after sunset I sat out with a glass of wine to toast the moonrise over the newly solidifying crowns of the trees. It was a waning moon that rose late like a big, lopsided orange into the warm embrace of a May night. It orbited low in the sky the way a summer moon does, and its skin shimmered with a faded chiaroscuro of dark craters and pale deserts. The moon’s disc was surrounded by a faint yellow corona, tinged at the edges with green. Although waning, it was still bright enough to lay shadows across my back lawn. I had to remind myself that moonlight was second-hand, that it reflected off lunar geography and travelled through airless desolation to reach me. No wonder it seemed to hypnotize what it touched. The moon that night was like an elliptical map of crumbling, empty civilizations, a fossil cameo lighting a sky that seemed almost green. Leaf green.

There were so many new leaves opening in the darkness you could almost hear them unfurling. The night was filled with chlorophyll, soaked in a deep, nocturnal emerald, and the warm air was perfumed with the fresh scent of millions of new leaves. Their raw, primal verdancy,
the delicate and immeasurable power of their growth, saturated the twilight. Millions of leaves were hatching like green butterflies from their chrysalis buds, their wings unfolding into leaves. When the next full moon ascends, those leaves will have reached full size—the shape they’ll hold all summer.

If I made a record of each full moon by scratching a circle above the noon scratch on my rudimentary solar calendar, I’d discover that there were about twelve full moons in a year. It’s a natural way to divide the year, and very early in our history, years were recognized to have twelve months. Alexander Marshak, an anthropologist who specializes in the interpretation of ancient artifacts, has deciphered what he believes to be the first lunar calendar. Discovered in 1960 in Uganda, it is a twenty-thousand-year-old piece of carved bone with a series of lines incised into it. If Marshak is right, this stone-age artifact (called the Ishango bone) pre-dates the earliest confirmed lunar calendar—on a Babylonian clay tablet from 750
B.C.
—by seventeen thousand years.

Lunar phases, whenever they began to be observed, provided the first monthly calendar for humans, and several religions, notably Judaism and Islam, still base the timing of their observances on the lunar cycle. Of the two, Islam is arguably the most strictly lunar; all of Islam’s important religious observances begin only when a cleric has made the first visual sighting of the moon’s crescent.

Today, regardless of the religious and sacred associations, calendars are largely secular, and very practical. They measure months, weeks and days in a gradated scale of chronometric precision, from coarse to fine, that allows us to plan our lives. A calendar is a bit like predicting the future. Which could be why the superstition arose that it’s bad luck to look ahead in a calendar, although anyone who believes this must not
get much done, because a calendar is the most basic of day-planners. And days are the most natural division of time. The circadian rhythm of night and day shaped the earliest origins of life and is the basic pulse of our existence. Weeks, instead, are much more abstract.

By 400
B.C.
the Greeks were unique amongst their fellow civilizations in following a planetary week, in which a different planet—the Sun, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—ruled each of the seven days. When Alexander the Great conquered Asia between 323 and 336
B.C.
, he brought this system to Egypt, where it caught on. It’s with us still, in both French and English, though more obviously in French. The English week has Saturday (Saturn’s day) and Sunday (the Sun’s day), but Francophones have
lundi
(the Moon’s day),
mardi
(Mars),
mercredi
(Mercury),
vendredi
(Venus) and a remnant of Jupiter in
jeudi.

Most other civilizations around the Mediterranean continued to follow an eight-day, or
nundinum
, cycle for centuries afterwards, although, for their own reasons, the Jews also observed a seven-day week. These inconsistent calendars remained unchanged for millennia, until the rise of the Roman Empire. Rome had inherited an eight-day
nundinum
from the Etruscans, but as their empire grew they were eventually exposed to the Egyptian system. Rome had always had a soft spot for mystery cults and practices originating in the Middle East, particularly if they came from Egypt. And the Egyptian association of individual gods with particular days was just too much to resist. The curious thing is that the seven-day week hadn’t already arrived in Rome along with everything else Hellenistic—Roman culture was 90 percent Greek, after all. But for some reason the seven-day week had to be exported from Greece to Egypt and then to Rome. The Roman adoption of the seven-day week came gradually, between 50
B.C.
and
A.D.
30. By
A.D.
79,
the year of the eruption of Vesuvius, it had been instituted throughout most of the Roman Empire.

The seven-day week was also a better fit with the lunar month, dividing more evenly into the twenty-nine-day cycle. Lunar months had always posed a problem for calendar makers. Early on, probably about 3,500 years ago, the Babylonians found that the solar year gradually got out of harmony with the lunar year. They calculated that by adding a day to their lunar month, changing the number of days in a year from 348 to 360, their calendars would agree more correctly with the length of the solar year. But eventually even this system got out of synchronization, so they devised a new, complicated method that changed the number of days in a year to as few as 353 and as many as 385.

The Egyptians adopted the Babylonian calendar early, probably by 3,000
B.C.
, though they simplified it by abandoning the lunar months altogether and instituting a 365-day calendar based on the flood patterns of the Nile River. Each month had thirty days, and at the end of every year, five additional days were added. This was the system that was passed on to the Romans. The Romans, however, soon noticed troubling minor discrepancies between the Egyptian calendar and the solar year, and it became Julius Caesar’s obsession to devise a perfect calendar. The calendar he created is essentially the one in use today throughout the world, though it was fine-tuned slightly by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and as a result is now called the Gregorian calendar. But how did the Egyptians come up with hours, and why are there twenty-four of them in a day? Lunar months are a natural division, as are years and days. Hours, on the other hand, have a slightly more ambiguous and numerological pedigree.

The number twelve held a mystical significance for the Egyptians. It was probably because the year divided naturally into twelve lunar
months that the priests of Ra likewise decreed that day and night would each be divided into twelve hours. But these “hours” were not of equal length. At the time of the winter solstice in Alexandria, the night lasts fourteen hours and the day ten hours, making an hour of night seventy minutes long and an hour of day only fifty minutes long. The Egyptians probably guessed this, but without clocks there was no way for the hours to be accurately measured. By 1600
B.C.
both Egypt and Babylon had clepsydras, or water clocks, that used water dripping from one measured container into another to determine equal lengths of time. The trouble was that the clocks were finicky and temperature-sensitive; when the water cooled at night, “time” would flow twice as fast. Still, the twenty-four-hour day prevailed and ultimately became the world standard. Yet the division of hours into minutes had to wait for thousands more years after the Egyptians.

In some sense, even with all my clocks—the digital clock on my stove, my analogue watch and my various wall clocks—the passage of the hours strikes me as mysterious. Clock time seems abstract and disconnected from my own experience of continuous time—the rising of the moon, the setting stars. As François Rabelais wrote, “I never follow the clock: hours were made for man, not man for hours.”

This morning, on my own time, I opened the blinds onto a new world—an empire of green. My house was flooded with emerald light. Overnight, in the moonlight, the trees had transformed from budmisted scaffolds into leafy landscapes. Summer was underway, and the boughs of the trees were restless in the breezy morning air, alive with their new weight of life. A new season had begun, and I felt a slight poignancy. But there is nothing sentimental about this lushness; it means business. We measure our years by seasons, and with each successive year those seasons are more deeply marked by the memories of seasons past. And the seasons unspool the story of our lives.