LIFE'S PRIVATE ETERNITY, PT.1

I was about nine years old when I realised I could see the minute hand of the living room clock moving. The second hand, as always, skittered around in its flighty circle, and with its movement I was quite familiar, but though I knew that they also moved, the other two hands had always appeared still. They were so weighty and ponderous in comparison to the rakish second hand, their advance as incremental as the lengthening of the day’s shadows; to be perceived only by looking away. But when I saw the tiny pulse of the minute hand, shunting it along, the hour seemed to shrink to almost nothing.

In a recent conversation with some friends it was mentioned that by the time you reach your mid-twenties your lifespan in terms of perceived time is half up. The Greeks conceived of Chronos time as the objective passing of time and Kairos time as our subjective experience of its passing. At thirty-one, my Kairos hourglass is more than half empty.

But to think of the future in terms of Kairos time is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Time is not ours until it happens, or until it has happened. It has no content without our containing of it. It passes over us like the current of the sea – it is current movement; it is always only now – and its deposit is memory, from which it has already departed. Some meditative practices aim to adjoin the mind to its flow, but our minds, built as they are for discernment, always want to alight on some moment or other, some fixity, whereas for time itself there are no moments, only continuous and unbroken movement. In Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson says:

“My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing – rolling upon itself as a snowball in the snow… But it is expedient to disregard this uninterrupted change, and to notice it only when it becomes sufficient to impress a new attitude on the body, a new direction on the attention. Then, and then only, we find that our state has changed… The apparent discontinuity of the psychical life is then due to our attention being fixed on it by a series of separate acts: actually there is only a gentle slope; but in following the broken line of our acts of attention, we think we perceive separate steps.”

Our minds make a contiguous mosaic of the continuous input that our senses receive. But if in doing this we lose the big picture, what we gain in pieces of the whole is our entire understanding. The rational frame demands separate and distinct objects with which to formulate thoughts; if we experienced only the unbroken forwards momentum of time we would then experience no stable individuality either in ourselves or in the world, and would therefore be without the mental building blocks from which our comprehension is assembled. It is our bodies that live the moment; our minds then reassemble its components into a subjectivised mental artefact. Comprehension comes after experience, and we know ourselves only by remembering ourselves, because all knowledge is memory.

In the mental world, attention is kineticism, it is the turning of the millwheel, so the more attention we pay, the more charged with energy are our memories. Or we could say, the more attention we pay, the more actively we participate in time – for attention requires a stabilising of the nervous system, the presence of the body – and the deeper the rivulet that its passing leaves in us.

Certain weeks I remember in more detail and density than entire years. Kairos time is acquiescent to our attentiveness and our inventiveness; the greater the novelty we can impart onto our experience of a given time, whether through the deepening of our mental state or the varying of the things that it perceives, the richer the pearl we are left with. There are innocuous moments I recall vividly simply because of the sustained attention I gave to them, such as reading the scrawling on the walls of a particular toilet cubicle when I decided not to look at my phone, or seeing a single yellow leaf on the tree outside my window catching the wind differently than the green ones around it, or the impression of being stood over by The Giant from Twin Peaks while meditating on my back. The reverse is also true; that monotony of experience leaves a far shallower impression on memory, and flattens and condenses our perception of time, as Thomas Mann attempts to demonstrate in The Magic Mountain, via the repetitious sojourn of Hans Castorp in the Berghof Sanitorium, having his protagonist reflect late in the novel:

“If today’s now – even with decent goodwill – was not easy to distinguish from yesterday’s, the day before’s or the day before that’s, which were all as like each other as the same number of peas, was it not also capable of being confused with the now which had been in force a month or a year ago, was it not also likely to be rolled round in the course of that other, to blend with it into the always?”

It is in the accumulation of our discontinuous perceptions that a sense of self emerges – in a way it is true to say that I am made up of the tree that I always look at outside my window, or the paragraphs of my novels that I have laboured over and can recite word for word, the conversations that I have been most engaged in, the faces of people I’ve loved. A thought experiment that has stuck with me ever since I heard it on an episode of the Weird Studies podcast is this: imagine if everything you’d remembered and everything you’d forgotten switched places, like the slats in one of those rotary billboards that revolve into a new image. Who then would you be? This kind of vertiginous self-questioning can make the ego – in the me, me, me sense of the word – withdraw like a snail into its shell.

Bergson, further on in Creative Evolution, explains the development of the personal ego by placing memory (or perception, the two of which being synonymous), in the first position, and suggesting that the ego arises as a secondary, albeit integral, by-product of it:

“…as our attention has distinguished and separated [mental states] artificially, it is obliged next to reunite them by an artificial bond. It imagines, therefore, a formless ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads the psychic states which it has set up as independent entities. Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other, it perceives distinct and, so to speak, solid colours, set side by side like the beads of a necklace; it must perforce then suppose a thread, also itself solid, to hold the beads together. But if this colourless substratum is perpetually coloured by that which covers it, it is for us, in its indeterminateness, as if it did not exist, since we perceive only what is coloured, or, in other words, psychic states.”

This explanation paints the past as a kind of organically growing set of rosary beads, the self the unconscious thread, and each memory a new station in a life of remembering. Time extends this thread, but when, looking back, we run the beads through our fingers, we find that it has departed our memories. Remembering, we reconstruct – we use time as an instrument of coherence, but we can never really reclaim it; we are free to jump from moment to moment, to speed things up or slow them down, to repeat, to expand, to amend – we are not working with time so much as with its negation, and as such when we cast our attention into the past it becomes a kind of playful sprite, hopping between perches, an illusory breath of life in the reanimation of things passed.

Memory is therefore our refuge from time, and our bulwark against its rapid advance. Only in the false world of remembrance – which is to us the most real world – can we stem time’s flow. And so brick by brick we build up an identity, and we are able to make a home of ourselves here in the storm of life’s passing. We construct the self through the constant revisitation of the self. And in working against time in this way, we experience, deceptive as it may be, a portion of the eternal. Because – though we know memory is fallible and fragile – as long as our memories last, their inexhaustible potential for revisitation is a kind of eternity, in the sense that the only true eternity is the absence of time. In Matter and Memory Bergson goes as far as to suggest that memory and spirit may share the same stratum of reality:

“Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration… If it is memory above all that lends to perception its subjective character… it follows that memory must be, in principle, a power absolutely independent of matter. If, then, spirit is a reality, it is here, in the phenomenon of memory, that we may come into touch with it…”

Not only does memory open for us a window onto the eternal but, each of us having yet had no experience of death – or of the end of time – all of our lifespans feel to us infinite. It awes me to think how distant childhood might seem to someone who has lived for ninety years. But what can I know of the span of a life but the life I’ve lived? To me, my thirty-one years are an eternity of experience. How could I know the quality of another’s eternity?

The eternal, being transcendent of time, is more qualitative as a concept than quantitative, or at least it makes out of the quantitative substance of time a qualitative whole. It makes an object of pure subjectivity. To the inner eye time is a valley, and time is a mountain – it is its own reflection, past and future, each agleam on the knife-edge of this instant called experience. So perhaps it is not right to think of the span of a life so much as the vastness of a life.

Time is one of the great sublimities – like its sister space, and silence, or water – which we are capable of imagining entirely immersing the universe in its own medium. In fact – like space, but unlike silence and water – we do experience the world wholly under the aspect of its influence. And like all vastnesses, and all sublimities, the benefit of distance allows for greater appreciation. In her novel of six lifetimes, The Waves, Virginia Woolf has her character Bernard express the desire to hold his life complete, apart from himself, as a sublime object to be shared:

“The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it to you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say ‘Take it, this is my life.”

Romantic and impossible as this dream is, there is something of its sort that happens in the course of a life – the distance we eventually gain from our years of childhood. Which of us really identifies with our childhood selves? As our youth recedes it gradually crystalises into something which feels in essence altogether different from the life we have come to experience since its passing, as a sort of chrysalis which we have outgrown but which now, in its apparent separateness, has its own infinity apart from us. This may be true, in a slightly lesser way, of later stages of life also, but I think the conditions of childhood make this separation unique. The objectivity of childhood, which holds it up like a crystal forever in our vision, is one way of conceiving why the traumas we may experience in our early years persist with such objective weight, because they landed, meteor-like, in our experience before our subjectivity was fully formed – childhood traumas are transgressions that become warps in the still-forming glass through which we later come to see the world. The glass can still be chipped and shattered in later life, but the effect is not the same as the imprints left upon it while it is still solidifying.

We can’t accept the harm done to children – and especially not their deaths – because to say that children are not meant to die is not merely to express an idealistic sentiment, it is a logical truth based on the conditions of animal life; children are born to grow, and the fact that both human children and the infants of the animal kingdom do die does not disprove this logic, only rents it with the same irreverent terribleness as some fundamental wound in the laws of nature. Infants are the immortals of the world. The death of children is perhaps the irreconcilable sorrow, because it is not one for which any justification has ever sufficed.

And so, at least speaking from a position of the ideal, the time of childhood – when our sense of self is still forming like a tower cresting the horizon, within which life awaits – is a unique pairing of extreme vulnerability with the conditions of immortality. Because while the knowledge of death may be present at the level of instinct, in our natural aversion to danger, we are by no means born with it. When I was eight or nine – around the same age as I noticed the movement of the minute hand – I saw another child in my school learn that he was going to die. He was not a classmate of mine, but was in the same year group, and as I remember it I was walking through the open-plan classroom in the middle of our floor of the school, and just happened to see this boy, standing while the rest of the class sat, crying and shaking his head and stamping his foot and saying “No, I don’t want to die!”

I stood and watched him with a comingling of pity, childish superiority and agreement. I didn’t want to die either. I had already learned this harshest of lessons myself – most likely it was a gradual realisation as I don’t remember a moment of discovery quite as terrible as the one I was witnessing – but death seemed so far away that I could still brush it aside for the time being, still immersed as I was in the discovery of life. It was not something I was ready to accept, and indeed, the knowledge of death is something even most adults can’t face.

And yet, for a human to attain true immortality would be more curse than miracle; take time out of the equation and what would we be left with? A bubble, a breath of air enclosed, a hermetically sealed and ageless eternity. Endless stagnation. In his story The Immortal, Jorge Luis Borges explores this fantastical condition:

“To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. I have noted that, in spite of religions, this conviction is very rare. Israelites, Christians and Moslems profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment… the republic of immortal men had attained the perfection of tolerance and almost that of indifference. They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men… No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”

The immortality of childhood is of course only a false immortality – youth is a period of beginning, something alien to the concept of infinity – but in this lies its magic. As children we are subjects of time – which is to say that we are capable of aspiring towards fulfilment – but we still feel that we have an eternity in which all possibilities might come true. Time is gentle with us, it has not yet foreclosed our dreams, not yet demanded of us to choose. We do not yet walk a path, but an open field. We can be a god, a hero, a philosopher, a demon, a world, because the conditions of childhood are play, and experiment, and discovery. It is all preliminary. The world brims over with the things we do not know, but might one day come to know.

I grew up on the outskirts of my city, but I vividly remember going into the centre as a child, where everything seemed so much bigger, cars and buses looked more like themselves, the buildings had so many extra floors and spaces beyond the ones we were allowed into. Everything seemed fit to burst with life. Liverpool sits on the River Mersey, and just being close to the ships at the docks which were bound for the open sea felt like being on the landing deck of a great ship preparing for voyage. The old buildings with rich wooden interiors were like storehouses of secret maps, any of which might be issued to me, perhaps through the opening of some secret drawer in the wall, setting me on a course to unknown treasure. I know now that I am remembering not one building, but a composite dream of one; not one day, but the dream of childhood itself. The unbroken promise of life.

But with the breaking of life’s promise – which is to say the promise of death – there is a new depth of awareness that awakens in us, a melancholy treasure to mark the end of our immortal years. Finite and precarious as our lives become, beauty and sadness open up to us at the same time. Further on in his story, Borges writes:

“Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream. Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous.”

We become aware that every step we take now carries us away from that field that was our first and eternal home. We are going somewhere now. There is a destination, which means there is an end, and everything has become consequential. Life becomes precious because possibility becomes actual, including the possibility of death. But in that first blush of adolescence the sorrow that comes to us like a second birthright can at least be soothed by the brook brimming at our feet we are removing our shoes to step into. The end of time is still too far away to really comprehend, and yet it has now begun. In The Waves, Jinny rejoices in this exact stage of life:

“I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the beginning,”

In a sense, we are always at the beginning. It is always only now. The Bergsonian snowball of Duration places us in the present as much as it does the past – we are the swelling of time, the ever-expanding instant, we are at the helm of a ship with which we are coexistent, whose form is identical with its journey. But just as the past can be conceived of as a swelling or amassing, like the sea on which we sail, so too can it be thought of as a comingling, like an ever-deepening colour blended on a painter’s palette; the ripening sky under which our voyage progresses.

But with the past behind and around us, and the future ahead, where does the eternal enter into our journey? When we are at rest? When the clouds part and the waves quell, and our anchor is pulled up, and the tranquil sea reflects the sky in a concord of colour? We may be tempted to think that such a scene as this is what Bernard envisions inside the orb of his life, as the divine moment that contains the whole. But lucid as such a moment might be, it would still have to fall in sequence into the mosaic; a particularly serene tile perhaps, like “the little space of sky that sleeps beside the moon” Woolf describes in To the Lighthouse, but temporal, and passing. Later in The Waves, Bernard, approaching the end of his life and speaking with the sort of finality of judgement that this emboldens, expresses his fondness not for stillness and serenity, but for the roil of the sea; the drama of society, and in his vicarious way enjoys once more perhaps the greatest treasure of every life – the expectancy of youth:

“I like to find the pageant of existence roaring, in a theatre for instance… Men with withered hands, women with pearl pagodas hanging from their ears, came in and went out. I saw old men’s faces carved into wrinkles and sneers by the work of the world; beauty cherished so that it seemed newly sprung even in age; and youth so apt for pleasure that pleasure, one thought, must exist; it seemed that grasslands must roll for it; and the sea be chopped up into little waves; and the woods rustle with bright-coloured birds for youth, for youth expectant... there we had our jokes and shared our secrets; and never parted in the doorway without arranging to meet again in some other room as the occasion, as the time of year, suggested. Life is pleasant; life is good. After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows.”

In seeing young people “apt for pleasure” his own youth becomes again accessible to him. He dreams his way back to the pleasantness of life, to the simplicity of past days whose promises have not so much expired as adhered to the very fabric of their memory.

Eternity is a plaything of the mortals. We touch it, as we have said, only in the remembrance of life, whose incidents in time are what give us a self with which to remember. We are immortal only in dreams – memory being the true dream that constitutes a life – but that we can dream we owe to our mortal condition, because only from within the passage of time can the possibility of a passage out – however ephemeral, however elusive – be conceived.