Time’s tyranny

Joan Lindsay, an old friend, didn’t believe in time. She’d remind us that her autobiography was titled Time Without Clocks – and, indeed, there were none in the home she shared with Sir Daryl, who must have found this most annoying. Nor did Joan wear a watch. “No point,” she told me. “It would just stop.” So the feeling was entirely mutual: time didn’t believe in her, either.

Joan’s disbelief in time’s tyranny is, as I’ve explained in past columns, the secret of her Picnic at Hanging Rock. A major clue is the way the coachman’s watch stops as they near their mysterious destination. In Joan’s mind, Miranda and the girls are not lost in space – they are lost in time, hence the inability of searchers to find them. They might return at any time. Perhaps modern-day picnickers to the Rock will come upon them this weekend. Miranda’s white dress perhaps a little torn from the undergrowth, but otherwise in good health. Bemused by all the fuss.

Jacquetta Hawkes, J. B. Priestley’s talented missus, agreed with Joan. Time isn’t, or wasn’t, as the case may be. And at least some theoretical physicists agree. Einstein, for example, who told us of time’s relativity, did from time to time mumble words to the effect that time was an illusion, albeit a powerful one. That past, present and future are like points on a map. Co-existing, not sequential. I don’t know what the professors of quantum mechanics have to say on the subject. Painfully and incomprehensibly counterintuitive, their simplest utterances make the brain ache.

So convincing is the illusion (or delusion) of time that its winged arrow dominates our religions. Dealing with the end of mortal time, they tend to grant us life after death. Heaven and Hell beckon for the true, if somewhat desperate, believers. Pentecostals tame time by having the world created 6000 years ago (at 9am on a Tuesday?), whereas the Hindus are much more generous, dealing in deep time extending back billions of years, and encouraging recycling. All of us seek to deny or defy death – when time’s rendered terrifyingly eternal – not only with prayers and pyramids but with pill-popping. Medicine seeks to delay, as long as inhumanly possible, the time when our personal time expires.

If unconvinced by faith’s promise of immortality – or unsatisfied by the form of endless life provided by the double helix of DNA – you can grasp at other scientific straws. Wealthy egomaniacs can climb into the deep freeze of cryonics in the uncertain hope of being thawed out in a future century, in full working order, a secular version of Christianity’s bodily resurrection. And it seems that half the Amazonian/Tesla class of entrepreneurs – egomaniacs one and all – are investing heavily in ways to extend the human lifespan in general and theirs in particular. At the very least, to preserve their consciousness via digital download. The latter-day version of your brain in a bottle.

Niels Bohr, another great theoretical physicist, made the observation that the opposite of one profound truth may well be another profound truth – and when applied to the length of our lives his gnomic idea seems oddly accurate. Yes, life is short. Yet also immensely long. Around 30,000 days, on average – more than enough to squander much of it in sleep, pointless distractions and the blasphemy of boredom. Time an illusion? Feel free to waste it.

PS, Marcel Proust proved that a biscuit is a time machine. So munch a madeleine today. Or try a Milk Arrowroot.