But there are further ramifications of the original Greek myth. If Cronos initiated a new epoch in our relationship to time, what was the nature of this new dimension—and why does time flow only one way?
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 rooted 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 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 it on its way into history. I imagine it without its pole, hovering in the air like an arrow in mid-flight.
But time is a wind that blows from a direction not marked by compasses or wind vanes, neither up nor down. In fact, according to Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and author, our perception of time as flowing like a river is mistaken. Time simply is. 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 toward 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; a parking ticket, once written out, cannot be revoked. (Indeed, the parking cop may be the perfect modern embodiment of time’s bureaucratic linearity.) But the inmate on death row does not live in an atemporal “timescape”; for him the clock ticks implacably onward. 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 famous dictum 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. 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, which, because it contains all time, must be eternal. The present, past, and future are merely currents in this ocean.
Literature offers many examples of this metaphor. 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, wrote an extraordin-ary 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 remembered past and the imagined future surge through us? Sometimes they flow silently, unseen and unfelt. Other times, we become aware of this buried current animating our lives.
One morning two days ago, there was a break in the rain—a warm, sunny morning. I sat out on my patio to have a coffee after breakfast. It was a meditative moment and as I looked out over my 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 had 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 yes, I would be free that night. Without missing a beat I had gone 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.
