Yet Cronos continues to live on. Not only is he the origin of our present-day Father Time, he also gave us the English term for the study of time: horology. The Greeks regarded Cronos as the father of the Horae, the hours. They also regarded him as all-powerful because he presided over the two most important aspects of our existence: the world and the mind. He brought things into being, he aged them and he made them disappear. On top of which, he ruled the intellect. After all, without the ordered flow of time, what could be learned or accomplished? With no “before” or “after,” no cause and effect, our mental world would disintegrate into meaninglessness.
Ultimately, Cronos was not the victim of his son’s rage, for the Greeks believed that Cronos existed in two forms: his absolute form was eternity and his relative form was time. He always had one foot outside of mortal time. Maybe that’s how he evaded Jupiter’s final revenge, shuffling the cards of past, present and future in order to escape to Italy, where he remained in exile as the Roman god Saturn. Ultimately, he was a mysterious god. He wasn’t physically present in the world. Except for his actions he was unseen. He was also unheard. As William Shakespeare wrote (in a rare tautologous moment) in All’s Well That Ends Well, “The inaudible and noiseless foot of time.”
Over the millennia Cronos was often conflated with Chronos, the Greek personification of time. But Chronos was more an idea than a deity. His name was the source of such time-related words as chronology, chronicle and synchronous. In fact, all the instruments we use to measure time preserve his name: chronometers, for instance, the clocks that ocean-going vessels used to navigate the seas along with sextants before GPS was invented. The aged, sickle-wielding figure of Saturn, as he was portrayed in Roman statues and representations, has also persisted, turning up in editorial cartoons and in New Year’s imagery as the slightly pathetic figure of Father Time.
FATHER TIME
He has a long, white beard and always carries the tools of his trade: a scythe and an hourglass. The scythe represents the harvest of the bounty of time (and, by association, death), while the hourglass stands for the ceaseless flow of time (and the measure of how little we have left). This association of Father Time’s scythe with death is echoed by another figure, the Grim Reaper, who also brandishes a scythe. In fact, the Reaper, who sometimes carries an hourglass as well, resembles a skeletal version of the more benevolent Father Time. Reflecting his Roman reincarnation as the god of agriculture, Father Time’s scythe is said to represent the waxing and waning of the seasons and the regenerative cycle of the crops. Some link the shape of the scythe to the crescent moon. Others say that the scythe represents the flint sickle that Cronos used to castrate his father.
Father Time’s old age has long symbolized the wisdom and the unfathomable depths of time. In the modern era, though, he seems to have become, strangely, a slightly buffoonish anachronism. At some point an editorial cartoonist decided to use the image of Father Time to depict the “old year,” and since then it has become a standby. In New Year’s Day cartoons, the outgoing year slumps away into the past, usurped and humiliated by a baby in diapers that represents the coming year. Any veneration that the classical image of Father Time once generated has been tarnished. Perhaps this modern incarnation of Cronos reflects our belief that Cronos’s power over us has diminished. His anachronistic implements, his scythe and hourglass, have been usurped by harvesters and atomic clocks.
THE FLOW OF TIME
My next-door neighbour, an older Portuguese man, has a weather vane that he’s nailed to a pole in his yard. He and his wife have lived here for years. He tends his fruit trees and vegetable garden according to the seasons; he is attuned to the earth and the cycles of the year. Weather is important to him, as it is to all farmers, and the weather vane, shaped like an arrow, gives him warning by pointing out the direction of the wind. An east wind almost always portends rain. All last week, during the deluge, the arrow pointed east. I like to think of his weather vane as the stationary arrow of time present, pointing into the future as the wind of time flows past. I imagine it without its pole, hovering in the air in mid-flight, like Zeno’s Arrow.
Zeno of Elea was born in 488 B.C. in Magna Graecia, a Greek colony in southern Italy. He was adopted and raised by the philosopher Parmenides. Zeno became a philosopher also, and when he came of age he went to Athens with Plato and founded his own school there. Among his students were Socrates and Pericles. During his career he devised a famous paradox, now known simply as “Zeno’s Arrow.” The paradox involves movement—Zeno used the analogy of an arrow in flight—and one interpretation of his paradox declares that an arrow shot towards a target will never reach it. According to this first interpretation, if an arrow in flight has travelled half the distance to its target, it still has to travel the remaining distance. If you divide the remaining distance in half, the arrow must traverse that distance as well. But what if you kept halving the distance to the target, in smaller and smaller divisions? You end up dividing the remaining space infinitely. If that is the case, declared Zeno, the arrow will never hit its target because it will always have to cross a distance that can be infinitely halved.
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 fam
ous 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.”
THE INNER TIMESCAPE
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 GHOST CREEK
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, o
pen 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.
Chapter Three
MONKS, STEAMBOATS AND FEMTONIANS: MEASURING TIME
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.
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