Time Travel: A History (15 page)

In the twentieth century the physicists took the moral lead—they had the power—and the philosophers mainly reacted or resisted. After Einstein’s message sank in, metaphysicians began to say without blushing that time and space have the same “ontological standing,” that they exist “in the same way.” As for poets, they lived in the same world, pulled the same tiles from the bag, and knew better than to trust all the words. Proust searching for lost time. Woolf stretching and warping it. Joyce assimilating the news about time as it came from the frontier of science. “Temporal or spatial,” says Stephen in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
“the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it.” No, it is not. Later came
Ulysses,
the book of a single day, exodus and return. “An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.” Leopold Bloom worries about magnetism and time, the sun and the stars, pulling and being pulled: “Very strange about my watch. Wristwatches are always going wrong.” Oh, there was unease.

Not everyone liked T. S. Eliot’s last long poem,
Four Quartets,
published from 1936 to 1942. Some accused it of self-parodic inscrutability. Not everyone thought it was a poem about time, but it is.
Here the impossible union / Of spheres of existence is actual, / Here the past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.
Does all time exist together? Is the future already contained in the past? Didn’t Einstein say so?

Along with quite a few of his contemporaries, Eliot was influenced by a slightly crackpot book,
An Experiment with Time,
written by an Irish aeronautical pioneer named John William Dunne. Dunne was an acquaintance of Wells who at the turn of the century began building aircraft models, then gliders, then powered biplanes, all tailless (a design with stability problems). In the twenties, having left aeronautics behind, he noticed that his dreams sometimes predicted future events. They were “precognitive dreams,” he decided. Reverse memory. He had dreamed of a volcano killing four thousand on a French island and then, later (or so he recalled), read in the newspaper of the Pelée eruption on Martinique, killing forty thousand. He began keeping a notebook and pencil under his pillow; he interviewed his friends about their dreams; and he put two and two together. By 1927 he had a theory and a book.

Dunne proposed to replace the foundations of epistemology with his new system. “If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe.” The past and the future coexist, in “the time dimension.” Incidentally, he wrote, he had stumbled upon “the first scientific argument for human immortality.” He put forward not a four-dimensional but a five-dimensional view of space and time. In explaining this, he adverted to Einstein and Minkowski and, as another authority, to Mr. H. G. Wells, who “through the mouth of one of his fictional characters, stated his case with a clearness and conciseness which has rarely, if ever, been surpassed.”

Wells himself did not approve. He assured Dunne that “prevision” was claptrap and that time traveling was make-believe—“that I [Dunne] have taken something which he never intended to be treated seriously…and have brooded too much upon it.” But Eliot and other literary searchers absorbed Dunne’s provocative ideas and imagery, including the prospect of a kind of immortality.
The future is a faded song,
Eliot writes.
The way up is the way down
(another fragment from Heraclitus),
and the way forward is the way back.
He has sensed that all time is eternally present, but he is not sure.
^*3
If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.

The Universe Rigid? Eliot in
Four Quartets
is not trying to persuade us of a system of the world. He suffers paradox and self-doubt. “I can only say,
there
we have been: but I cannot say where.
 
/
 
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.” He speaks through masks. Not only are words slippery; the problem with using words to describe time is that words themselves are
in
time. A string of words has a beginning, a middle, and an end. “Words move, music moves
 
/
 
Only in time.” Is eternity a place of motion or of stillness? Movement or pattern? Can these coexist?
At the still point of the turning world?
When he says a Chinese jar moves perpetually in its stillness, you know that’s a metonym. What moves perpetually in its stillness is a poem.
^*4

You shall not think “the past is finished” or “the future is before us.”
Time does not belong to us; we cannot grasp it or define it. We can barely count it.
The tolling bell,
Eliot tells us,

Measures time not our time, run by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless.

—

WHEN BORGES,
the philosopher poet, wrote that time is a river, he meant approximately the opposite. Time is not a river, nor is it a tiger, nor a fire. Borges, the critic, used a bit less paradox, a bit less misdirection. His language regarding time is apparently plain. In 1940 he, too, wrote about Dunne and his
Experiment with Time,
declaring it absurd, in a mild way. Part of Dunne’s argument was a reflection on consciousness—how it cannot be contemplated without falling into recursive loops (“a conscious subject is conscious not only of what it observes, but of a subject A that also observes and therefore, of another subject B that is conscious of A, and…” on and on). He was onto something important, recursion as an essential feature of consciousness, but then he concluded that “these innumerable intimate observers do not fit into the three dimensions of space, but they do in the no less numerous dimensions of time.” Borges knew this was nonsense, and it was his kind of nonsense. He saw something in it, a way to think about how the perception of time must be built on memory: “successive (or imaginary) states of the initial subject.” He recalled an observation made by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “If the spirit had to reflect on each thought, the mere perception of a sensation would cause it to think of the sensation and then to think of the thought and then of the thought of the thought, and so to infinity.” We create memories or our memories create themselves. Consulting a memory converts it into a memory of a memory. The memories of memories, the thoughts of thoughts, blend into one another until we cannot tease them apart. Memory is recursive and self-referential. Mirrors. Mazes.
^*5

Dunne’s precognitive dreams and involuted logic led him to a belief in a preexisting future, an eternity within human reach. Borges said Dunne was making the mistake “those absentminded poets” make when they start to believe their own metaphors. By absentminded poets he seemed to mean physicists. By 1940 the new physics took the fourth dimension and the space-time continuum as real, but Borges emphatically did not:

Dunne is an illustrious victim of that bad intellectual habit—denounced by Bergson—of conceiving time as a fourth dimension of space. He postulates that the future toward which we must move already exists (also conceived in spatial form, in the form of a line or a river).
^*6

Borges had more to say than most about the problem of time in the twentieth century. For him paradox was not a problem but a strategy. He
believed
in time—its reality, its centrality—yet he titled his crucial essay “A New Refutation of Time.” Of eternity he was not so fond. In another essay, “A History of Eternity,” he declared: “For us, time is a jarring, urgent problem, perhaps the most vital problem of metaphysics, while eternity is a game or a spent hope.” Everyone “knows” (said Borges) that eternity is the archetype and our time merely its fleeting image. He proposed the opposite: Time comes first; eternity is created in our minds. Time is the substance, eternity the effigy. Contrary to Plato—contrary to the Church—eternity is “more impoverished than the world.” If you are a scientist, you may substitute infinity. That is your creation, after all.

As for his new refutation of time, its essence is an argument he has “glimpsed” or “foreseen” and in which he himself does not believe. Or does he? It comes to him in the night. In the Proustian hours. What is time when you awaken, between dreams, register the rustling sounds, the shadowy walls—or, let’s say you’re Huckleberry Finn, rafting down the
river…

Negligently he opens his eye: he sees an indefinite number of stars, a nebulous line of trees. Then he sinks into a sleep without memories, as into dark waters.

Borges notes that this is “a literary, not a historical” case. The doubting reader is invited to substitute a personal memory. Think of an incident in your past.
When
is that memory? Not at any time—not at any
precise
time. It is an instant on its own, suspended, apart from any supposed space-time continuum. Spacetime? “I tend to be always thinking of time, not of space,” Borges writes. “When I hear the words ‘time’ and ‘space’ used together, I feel as Nietzsche felt when he heard people talking about Goethe and Schiller—a kind of blasphemy.”

He denies simultaneity, just as Einstein did, only Borges does not care about the signal velocity (light speed) because our natural state is alone and autonomous, our signals are fewer and less reliable than the physicist’s.

The lover who thinks, “While I was so happy, thinking about the faithfulness of my beloved, she was busy deceiving me,” is deceiving himself. If every state in which we live is absolute, that happiness was not concurrent with that betrayal.

The lover’s knowledge cannot modify the past, though it can modify the recollection. Having dispensed with simultaneity, Borges also denies succession. The continuity of time—the whole of time—another illusion. Furthermore, this illusion, or this problem, the never-ending effort to assemble a whole from a succession of instants, is also the problem of identity. Are you the same person you used to be? How would you know? Events stand alone; the totality of all events is an idealization as false as the sum of all the horses: “The universe, the sum total of all events, is no less ideal than the sum of all the horses—one, many, none?—Shakespeare dreamed between 1592 and 1594.” Oh, Marquis de Laplace.

We have a tendency to take our words too seriously, which happens (paradoxically) when we are unconscious of them. Language offers a woefully meager set of choices for expressing what we need to express. Consider this sentence: “I haven’t seen you for a [?] time.” Must the missing word be
long
?
^*7
Then time is like a line or a distance—a measurable space. The language forces this upon us. Who was the first person to say that time “passes” or time “flows”? We are seldom conscious of the effect of language on our choice of metaphors, the effect of our metaphors on our sense of reality. Usually we give the words no thought at all. When we do, we may well wonder what we’re really saying. “I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not,” Philip Larkin wrote to his lover Monica Jones. The words lead us in a certain direction.

In English and most Western languages, the future lies ahead. In front of us. Forward. The past is behind us, and when we are running late we say we have fallen behind. Yet this forward-backward orientation is neither obvious nor universal. Even in English, it seems we can’t agree on what it means to move a meeting
back
one day. Some people are certain that back means earlier. Others are equally certain that it means later. On Tuesday, Wednesday lies before us, though Tuesday is before Wednesday. Other cultures have different geometries. Aymara speakers, in the Andes, point forward (where they can see) when talking about the past and gesture behind their backs when talking about the future. In other languages, too, yesterday is the day ahead and tomorrow is the day behind. The cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, a student of spatiotemporal metaphors and conceptual schemas, notes that some Australian aboriginal communities orient themselves by cardinal direction (north, south, east, west) rather than relative direction (left, right) and think of time as running east to west. (They have a strongly developed sense of direction, compared to more urban and indoor cultures.) Mandarin speakers often use vertical metaphors for time: 上 (
shàng
) means both above and earlier; 下 (
xià
) means below and next. The up month is the one that just ended. The down month is on its way.

Or are
we
on
our
way? Boroditsky and others speak in terms of “ego-moving” versus “time-moving” metaphors. One person may feel the deadline approaching. Another may feel herself approaching the deadline. These may be the same person. You may swim onward, or the river may bear you.

If time is a river, are we standing on the bank or bobbing along? “To say time passes more quickly, or that time flows, is to imagine
something
flowing,” wrote Wittgenstein.