[distant.star]

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."

-David Henry Thoreau


For as long as I can remember time has fascinated, perhaps obsessed me. Unlike the sharp knife that divides my tasty sandwich, I cannot pick it up and wield it. My experience of it is passive. I observe, but I see nothing. Like looking at a clock face with no second hand, I cannot watch it progress or move or do whatever it does. Not only can I not define it, I cannot be certain it exists outside my own fallible perceptions.

While I can appreciate the scientific approach and theories of speed of light and dimensional shifts and the parallel universes of string theory, I long ago realized they cannot provide the answers I want. And they provide damn little comfort.

On a serious plane, people like Loren Eiseley have more to say to me about time than others. As an anthropologist, he worked through time, and he knew it well. Simply read his autobiography, aptly named "All the Strange Hours."

I have written a few things about time and how it oppresses me. A couple of quotes:

"As I’ve said so often, I’m a prisoner of time. Mostly I feel like a little kid in a third-grade classroom. The teacher drones on and I look out the window wondering about all the different places there are and what’s happening in those places. Well, sometimes I get a pass out of the classroom. It’s rare. It doesn’t happen often, and like spiritual grace it is always unexpected and undeserved. Today, I got a pass.

"I was reading my blog friend Jackie Donnelly’s post for yesterday, Thursday, January 21 and she wrote:

'While Sue was taking her time exploring some nook of the river bank, I moved alone through a stand of tall hemlocks and just stood and listened. At first all was motionless and silent. Then I began to notice — now here! now there! — flitting shapes in the tops of the trees, and I heard the peek! peek! peek! of a flock of chickadees dashing about in the branches above. Such dear little birds! I do believe they come to check us out.'

"Standing alone in the woods and just listening! Communing with chickadees! How rare is such a thing? Then I had a vision, somewhere in the distant future a little girl is reading that passage about a woman standing alone in the woods, and she thinks wondrously, 'That was my great-grandmother.' It puts that child in touch with a mystical legacy in no other way imaginable. Neither Jackie nor any of us live forever. We all accept that fact, although most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. Until now there has rarely been much of a way for most of us to pass along much about the reality of our lives (outside of genetics anyway)."

And:

"For me, time is the impregnable wall of a prison. I am a prisoner of time, and it oppresses every second of my being. Our one-dimensional, linear perception of time cannot be all there is. Physicists are now theorizing that the freedom I long for is so tantalizingly close, if I only knew how to get to the other side of that damnable wall."

There have been times, as I mentioned in that quote, when I have actually sensed a multi-dimensional aspect of time. The experience of that little girl reading a passage far in the future was virtually visceral. Now I don't know what the girl looked like, and I don't know if she was reading it on a Kindle, but I know I was in a time when that was happening. The little girl who was reading that passage does not exist in this time we now see as real.

There are times when all of us, I believe, experience this other aspect of a time, but I also think it takes a certain perception few of us are willing to develop. Perhaps not all of us have the inherent talent, but I think we do. Gary Zukov talks about senses that supersede the five conventional ones. I can recall being in a supermarket late one evening a few days after our July Fourth weekend. Hot dogs that hadn't been sold for the celebratory picnics were on sale at the unbelievable price of 17-cents per one-pound package. That's a price not generally seen in this country since some time in the 1940s or 1950s. Since it was late, the store lights had been dimmed. Several other items were also on substantial sale. Not seeing anyone around, I knew I was experiencing something out of my time. These kinds of little trips are not the visceral kind. I'd love to go back to Philadelphia in October, 1957, pick up a newspaper for five cents at a corner newsstand and sit in a coffee shop reading the current news. Not going to happen in my little time trips. At least it hasn't happened in any of the travels I've found myself in so far.

The most fun reading I've ever done in the time travel realm, so to speak, is by Jack Finney. "Time and Again" is a book I've read countless times. The time travel theme was his major one, and almost all of his writing addresses it one way or another.

A fascinating little research conclusion for me is that most people, given an option, would travel back in time rather than forward. For years and years now, I've been asking people where they would go in time if they could go anywhere. Almost no one has gone forward. I surmise it's the known versus the unknown.

And finally, since there seem to be a lot of UK types here, I'll pose another sort of temporal question I've never gotten a good answer to. Why do Brits refer to time redundantly?

For example, I'll hear on BBC a reader say, "The Prime Minister will meet with the U.S. president in three days time." Why do they feel compelled to tell me that three days represents time? Is it so I can distinguish from three days corn fritters? Or three days petrol? No one, including serious linguistics experts, has ever had an inkling why this is so. I don't mean to hijack the thread, but it's an aside that seems appropriate.

And with that I'll end for now. For now, whatever that means.