On Time

 For any of you who have not visited Cambridge recently, this is, prosaically, the 'Corpus Clock' on the corner of Corpus Christi College, where Cro's father, Raymond worked for most of his career. More gloriously it is also referred to as the 'Chronophage' (time eater) and it is a good place to start today's post.

Time can be quite slippery. You see the clock ticking regularly on the mantlepiece or watch the Chronophage eating, and you tend to think that time is very predictable and standardised. So just in the way that a kilo is always a kilo and a pint is always a pint, then you think that an hour or a second or a century is stable and equal. 

But that is not at all how it seems. I spoke to many people in the two months after Cro died, as we came up to the big Viking send-off, and many people said the same thing "Sometimes it seems like yesterday since she died, sometimes it seems like years". Time was telescoping and collapsing, it seemed, in response to the huge emotions released. It felt that somehow Time was not equal to the task of putting events into their proper place, especially so close to their occurrence. And maybe they did not have a proper place to be put. When someone dies, the persistence of their existence is very strong. You turn around to speak to them and it is often a shock to remember that you cannot. I remember a very strong feeling at the Christmas dinner table two months after my father died back in 1977 and you would swear he was there and that the seven or eight chairs were somehow in a Schrödinger-like relationship with each other. Persistence. And of course, as I have probably said here already, I do not feel that Cro is 'gone', because so much of me is made of the things that we did together, and those events are in some way outside of me and if they are outside of me then Cro is as much in them as I am. At least that is how it seems, though I could not deny that it may be a trick of memory.

But to follow the theme of time being slippery, I think we need to get a few things straight about it. Time only exists, I'd say, when there are things, events, to measure and organise against it. I understand that theoretical physicists will state clearly that before the Big Bang there was no Time because there was nothing that happened. No happenings, no time. But even in our gloriously rich lives, we still require events for Time to make any sense. The old alleged Indian greeting of 'many moons since we have met' is a good example; The coming and going of the moon is an event that makes Time. Maybe our attraction to sunrises and sunsets is similarly because it shows time ("Just another Tequila Sunrise..")

Another facet of Time that we have to admit is that - in reality - there is only one bit of it that we experience, and that is you reading these words. Now. Too late, you've read them and now that bit is in the past, but there is another Now coming along soon if you watch out for it. All the things that we think of as 'Past' are really just our memory of something that actually happened, which is now so irretrievably beyond our control that it might as well be Ancient Sumeria. Even that 'Now' three lines above is gone and Past. And as for the Future, well anything might happen (as my routine June health check proved) and we have no more control over what actually happens, as opposed to our plans for it, than we do over Ancient Sumeria. 

So the only slight sliver of Time that we have any sort of control over is this moment. Me writing, as I am, and you reading as you are (and whether that is now, next year, or even after I am dead). And then decide what you do with your day, in that knowledge of living in the moment. It may be all that we have, but boy is it glorious!