Does Time Drag or Fly?
[Quiltnmomi agreed to let me tag along on her topic today. My own caveat: don’t read mine without assimilating hers!]
Some time ago, idling around the springtime yard picking up lawnmower-threatening sticks and watching the kids cavort on the tire swing and the tree limb, I thought about how time flies. Can my kids really be seven and four already? When did that happen? Just yesterday, seemingly, they were little nursing-and-pooping machines with slightly cloudy eyes and a fixation on Everything Mother, to my eternal exhaustion. Then, I thought each minute oozed, and I gritted teeth when folks insisted “Watch out; it all goes so fast!” Now, my eldest is immersed in books she’s reading to herself all day, and my youngest, the personable chatterbox, engages herself in hours-long discussions with her toys and dolls if no actual warm body is available for play. They’ve become individuals with their own timescales that coincide only intermittently with my own. Yesterday, for example, just back from a business trip with a thousand personal and professional things to accomplish, time pressed heavily for my every waking minute. For my eldest, however, sick with Strep and desirous of heavy mothering, time plodded.
Beyond the perceptions of the individuals sharing a timeframe comes a longer view of our brief ownership thereof. Shakespeare, as usual, says it best:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, of course, was a character for whom time both dragged and flew, and both with weighty and frightening import. Maybe his perception isn’t, after all, the best to encompass a more modern timesense.
One of the videos I rented to sooth my feverish eldest was Disney’s rendition of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” one of my own all-time favorite works of teen literature. The book isn’t so much about time as it is about the power of love and all thoughts individual, creative and positive – but it does introduce some weighty concepts of its own about the physics of time, and how our standard concept of beginnings, middles and endings (our brief time-candle, alight, and then out) may be misconceptions, or at least misperceptions.
The other day I happened across a tidbit of science news regarding astronomers’ latest glimpse of the swirling, scattering stars born in the formation of the universe. Across unimaginable expanses of time, this long-gone image reached their lenses only last month: a bit of living time-archeology marching side-by-side with the modern minute. It boggles the mind to think of us, in the hear-and-now, putting an eye to the sky and seeing the formation of the universe so long ago. “An estimated 15 billion years ago … the universe began with a cataclysm that created space and time, as well as all the matter and energy the universe will ever hold. This timeline attempts to show the best scientific estimates of the timings of past events and predictions of the approximate timing of hypothetical future events with cosmological significance. Some locally significant events of interest to members of Homo sapiens are also included. "
If there were ever a reason to postulate God, the phrase ‘created space and time’ (BANG!) seems an apt enough genesis.
Here on the American continental east side, Sunday was the “time change;” a presumptuous phrase indeed in light of the magnitude of “time creation.” Homo sapiens can, we assume, change a clock – but time itself? Or is time only a figment of our little minds, after all; the “Drag-n-fly” that is both an amalgam of human perception and, a metamorphosis into something entirely otherwise, entirely unknown – and entirely awe-inspiring?
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