by Peter Høeg
* * *
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 Oberwohlfach, 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 society 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 civilization 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 civilizations, 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 International 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 personally 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 uninterrupted chain of both cyclic and linear traits can be found; identical 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 species, 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, toward 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 burde
n 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 without 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.
All the other days were alike. Actually, my school days were no different from my time in isolation. Apart from the fact that, at the latter establishment, I had no one to talk to and so reality went to pieces.
Otherwise there was no difference. The succession of days was an endless line, gray. They ran past you. Yourself, you were held firmly in place, you stood absolutely still and watched them running past, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Maybe, somewhere inside you, you felt that surely it could have been otherwise. That it had not needed to be so hard and gray and monotonous. But you saw no way out. Until I met Katarina. But then, of course, everything fell apart.
* * *
When all the days were the same, when they recurred and recurred, and were planned out ten years into the future, why did you feel that time was passing, that it was linear, that your school days were a kind of countdown, that time was a train that you must and ought to be fit enough to hang on to?
I think it was because of the insistence on achievement. Otherwise it is impossible to explain.
* * *
Of course, it was only from the outside that the days seemed the same. Deep down they were meant to be different. It only seemed as though the same subjects and the same classrooms and the same teachers and the same pupils came around again and again. In reality, the requirement was that you should, with every day, be transformed. Every day you should be better, you should have developed, all the repetition in the life of the school was there only so that, against an unchanging background, you could show that you had improved.
I suppose that is why numbers were so important. I suppose that is why Biehl was so particular about the achievements in his memoirs, and why there were marks and timetables and endless files and summaries of people’s pasts and proficiency and how many times they had been late. They saw the school as some divine ennobling machine. The numbers were proof and verification of its feasibility, its efficacy.
I know I cannot bring anyone to understand this. How our lives back then were totally saturated by time. Even those who were involved back then, even Biehl and Karin Ærø and all you others whom I have in mind, even you would deny it.
I believe we were on the outermost edge. I believe we were as far out as anyone can go with time. We were held down as tightly as anyone can be held down by a clock. So hard, in fact, that if your shell was not very thick, then you fell completely or partially to pieces.
I have felt that time ran in our veins like blood.
And if you became ill, if you cracked under time, then you were suffering from a disease of the blood.
Now and then—those nights when I lie awake, when I just listen to the woman and the child breathing—I grow frightened. And I fear that things may not have changed, out in the world; that time’s grip will not have slackened.
I hope I am wrong. This is my greatest wish. To be utterly wrong.
* * *
Of course, there were schools elsewhere, too, this I know. But surely no place with a vision such as Biehl’s.
Elsewhere, in other countries, they have held children in the grip of time, for a while they have held them. But, in time, those children who could not cope, or whose parents did not have the wherewithal, were given up, dropped.
But Biehl would not give up on anyone, that was the exceptional thing—maybe the exceptional thing about Denmark. They would not entertain the thought that some pupils were down there, in darkness. They did not want to know anything about the darkness, everything in the universe had to be light. With the knife of light they would scrape the darkness clean.
It is as though that thought was almost insane.
THREE
They took me off the medicine gradually, over a week. It is much harder to come off medicine than to go onto it. In all, over those seven days, I did not sleep as much as eight hours.
The department representative who collected me was accompanied by a policeman and an observer from Child Welfare Services, this was unnecessary, but they did not know what had taken place, they felt insecure. I was also handcuffed.
It took place at the school. This was standard departmental practice—as close to the scene of the crime as possible.
In order to have enough room, they had had to take over a classroom. In addition to Biehl, Karin Ærø, and Fredhøj, and the representatives from the Department of Education, Stuus was there—as chairman of the board of teachers—along with two representatives from the parents’ association; Aage Hårdrup, B. D.; Hessen; Flakkedam; my guardian from the Children’s Panel, Johanna Buhl; the district medical officer; Astrid Biehl; and a woman I had not seen before, but who might have been the legal representative for the Department of Health and Welfare. I counted sixteen people altogether, plus Katarina and myself, the child welfare representative, and the policeman. It was said that the director of education for Copenhagen, Baunsbak-Kold, should also have been there, but had sent word to say that he was unavoidably detained.
They had positioned the desks so as to form a boxed-off compartment on either side of the teacher’s desk. Katarina and I stood, each in our respective boxes, Biehl and Karin Ærø and Fredhøj sat over by the wall, the department representatives sat by the window, with the light behind them. When the proceedings had been under way for some time, Humlum came in, ever so quietly, and took a seat in the back row.
The department’s representatives did most of the talking. They said this was not a trial or an inquisition, but merely an informal hearing, called to clear up certain points at issue.
They then summarized the background to the case—with which we were quite familiar. An experiment in the integration of defective children into normal schools that had now been abandoned, following what had occurred, but all particulars of which were still confidential. This last was directed at Katarina and myself. One sensed, in the room, a bitter, tense atmosphere—particularly between the school and the representatives of the department. You were never told what had gone before. But one sensed that it must have been a disaster, Ragnarok.
First of all, they said, they were interested in hearing more about something that Peter—they meant me—had kept repeating, when questioned during his detention: that we had carried out an experiment. What was this about, what had I meant?
I did not remember having been questioned, to this very day I do not remember it, it must have been after the first three weeks of isolation, so I could not give them any answers. I was also having hot flushes, and spasms, after having come off the medicine. I stood with my arms folded to keep from shaking, but the desk I was lean
ing against still rocked. Nor was I used to so many people, they could see this and gave up on me.
Then they turned to Katarina. You would not have believed she could become any paler, but she had. She had difficulty in talking. We had not seen each other for six months and eleven days, and yet I knew her as easily as though we were linked to each other, as though we were connected across time and space. As though we were twins, unborn twins linked together in their mother’s womb.
You could see she did not blame me for having mentioned the experiment to them, she understood that I had been in isolation and pushed beyond time and reality, she had nothing bad to say about me, we were still friends. Even though she had maintained absolute silence for six months, and I, in a way, had betrayed us. All of this I saw in her face, before she answered them.
“I had discovered that there had to be different types of time,” she said. “I discovered it when my father and mother died. Peter had seen it, too, we did research into the other types.”
Everything went silent for a very long while, and in the silence they became convinced of what they had always known. That we were not in our right minds, not even she.
This she sensed.
“Let’s just get it over with,” she said.
It was like giving permission. That is how she was. Even among these people, at this moment, she could give permission.
Following her words, a sense of relief settled on the room. Now there was no more uncertainty. Now all doubt was gone. She had given them permission to cease doubting. We had been out of our minds, August, Katarina, and me, this was the explanation. Not accountable.
* * *
Doubt was always the worst.
“What is most detestable,” Biehl had said, “is when a child lies or conceals something.”
In other words, when something is kept hidden, unclarified. That was the worst.
This was what I had tried to explain to Katarina, that night when we were sitting on her bed. That the whole school was like a device designed to remove doubt.