Time is something we experience every single day, whether it is someone asking you if you will be “on time” for an event or watching time “fly by.” We are so familiar with it, but do we really know what it is? As St. Augustine wrote in his work Confessions, “Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly than time?” (Augustine 93; ch. XI, sec. 17) From this realization, Augustine comes to the most vital and simple question: “What then is time?” This question has survived long past Augustine’s time, and has been considered by thinkers, writers, poets, and even musicians. Throughout history, three different perceptions have come about: time is absolute, time is relative, and time is irrelevant.
“This thing all things devours”
Arguably one of the most prevalent views of time in both philosophical thought and literary writing is the view of time as an absolute force, an all powerful master that controls mankind, a “bloody tyrant” (Shakespeare ln. 2) that destroys all things. From the writings of the early Marcus Aurelius to the lyric writing of musicians such as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, mankind for years has seen time as an inevitable flow, both affecting all things in its path and refusing to change, despite mankind’s attempts at changing it.
“Motion and changes are continually renewing the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always renewing the infinite duration of ages,” writes Marcus Aurelius in his book Meditations (Aurelius 275; bk. VI, sec. 15). Aurelius’s predecessors, thinkers like Aristotle and Plato, almost always saw time as the measurement of motion (Aristotle 298) (Plato 450). Humans alone defined what time was by observing motion. To Aurelius, however, time was not just the observation of change. Instead, time was an “uninterrupted course,” flowing through history. Time was not a perception of humans, but rather a force on its own.
Although Aurelius mentions the renewing nature of the force of time, many writers in later centuries found a much crueler side to the force of time. William Shakespeare in “Sonnet 12” writes:
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death (Pink).
Though we may “run and run to catch up with the sun,” time still passes and brings death to man. From the writings of these poets and authors, time became, in their minds, an indestructible force, devouring the beauty of Shakespeare’s lover and beating down the mountains of Middle Earth.
In fact, time not only became indestructible, but also unchangeable. On the off chance that anyone knew the future, writers maintained that they could not change what will happen because the force of time is unstoppable. This illusion of free will is one of the major themes in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House-Five, a novel about a time traveling World War II veteran. In the book, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who see past, present, and future all at once, rather than from the present time (Vonnegut 27). During his capture, Billy finds out that the universe is destroyed in the future by the pressing of a button on a test engine for a flying saucer. Since the aliens have this foreknowledge, Billy asks them why they do not attempt to stop it from happening. They simply respond that “he has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way” (Vonnegut 117). To the aliens, the destruction of the universe is inevitable simply because time dictates that it will happen. Since it cannot be changed, it always will happen, despite what anyone does to stop it.
Another example of the view that time can never be changed is in a short story titled “Time Telephone” by Adam Roberts. In the story, scientists find a way to communicate with the past through phone lines. Taking advantage of the technology, people begin warning people in the past of deaths of loved ones and giving tips on stock to invest. However, as Roberts writes, time remains unchanged by their efforts: “Although people warned loved-ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, the loved ones still died, and nobody found themselves suddenly rich because their earlier selves had invested more wisely. None of that happened” (Roberts). Despite man’s attempts at changing the past, time was unchanged. Time still devoured. Time still renewed. In the minds of a Roman emperor or a modernist American novelist, time was the all-powerful unchanging force of the universe.
“The Emperor hoped to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First”
Despite the view of unchanging time being the most popular view for many centuries, the 20th century gave birth to an altogether different mode of thought: post-modernism. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literacy and Cultural Criticism states that a post-modernist is one who “accepts, whether indifferently or with celebration, the indeterminacy of meaning and the decenteredness of existence” (Childers 235). In the same way that post-modernism found indeterminacy in the meaning of existence, it also found indeterminacy in the meaning of time. With the rise of modern thought, time was no longer thought of as a master, but rather a servant. Authors and thinkers began to think of time as relative, and, under this new viewpoint, began to define time for themselves.
In the beginning of the 20th century, a man named Albert Einstein came up with the theory that would redefine time as relative. In his theory of relativity, Einstein theorized gravitational time dilation, a theory that states that time passes slower in areas of higher gravitational potential (Einstein). This theory has been since validated by many experiments with clocks at higher altitude. The theory did much more than just revolutionize the science field, however. With time itself being redefined as relative, writers and thinkers began to see things much differently. Gone was the notion that time could not be changed. With time as a relative factor, time was a servant to man, not the other way around.
This thought process did not begin in the 20th century, however. William James in 1890 wrote this about time in his book Principles of Psychology: “Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time's flow depends” (James 406; ch. XV). Rather than making time its own force, William James theorized that the flow of time is based on human awareness of changes happening, a reference to the thought process of Plato and Aristotle. Thus, time is man’s attempt at explaining changes, and might be different from person to person, much like writer Washington Irving wrote of his character Rip Van Winkle: “for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night” (Irving 55).
As the thought of relative time crept into the 20th century, many authors put aside the traditional view of time and redefined time for themselves. One example of man trying to redefine the nature of time is in the short story “No Particular Night or Morning” by Ray Bradbury. The story takes place in a rocket that is flying in the middle of space. Onboard, there is an astronaut named Hitchcock, who, in order to forget memories of his troubled childhood, adopts a unique perspective of time. Time, in his mind, only exists in the present, and the things in the past are dead and unimportant. “I won’t shape what I do tomorrow by some lousy thing I did yesterday,” he comments. “I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead” (Bradbury 168). In order to destroy the memory of his problematic childhood and his parents that he despised, Hitchcock views time as it most conveniences him.
In fact, man’s convenience is most often the driving force for attempts at redefining time. In his essay “The Wall and the Books,” Jorge Luis Borges discusses Emperor Shih Huang Ti of China, who, while building the Great Wall, also burned all the books that had been written about history before him. “Perhaps the Emperor hoped to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First, in order to be truly the first, and he named himself Huang Ti in order to be in some way Huang Ti, the legendary emperor who invented writing and the compass,” he writes (Borges 67). By destroying all previous knowledge and making himself the first, Shih Huang Ti was attempting to control time and make it serve him. If his people did read books of emperors before him and were reminded of other times, time would work against him. So, in order to define time in his own convenience, he made himself the first by burning all the books before him. As far as the Emperor was concerned, time could be defined however he thought fit.
Ever since a German scientist first launched humanity into the age of relativity, the thinkers and writers of the 20th century suddenly found freedom. No longer were they subject to the theory that time was their master. Now, they were the masters. Time was enslaved to their perception of it, and time could no longer hold the power to destroy. Time was theirs.
“Time goes by, and man perceives it not.”
Although these two conflicting views of relative time and absolute time have been the prevailing theories, another view point still exists. Rather than using the physical world to perceive time, this view uses the supernatural world and the idea of eternity to perceive what time is. By taking into account the idea that there is an eternal God and that we will live in eternity, time can be summed up in one single word: irrelevant. In the scope of eternity, time is just man’s narrow view of his circumstances and is irrelevant to our existence.
One area of study in which this view is most prevalent is in theology. Thomas Aquinas, a famous theologian, discusses the meaning of eternity and time in his book Summa Theologica. In question ten, he theorizes that time measures the succession of movement, putting it in categories of before and after. However, since eternity has no beginning and no end, there is no before or after to measure. “As therefore the idea of time consists in the numbering of before and after in movement; so likewise in the apprehension of the uniformity of what is outside of movement, consists the idea of eternity,” says Aquinas (Aquinas 41; q. X, art. 1, obj. 6). Since eternity is immutable, human perception of time becomes completely irrelevant. Other teachings in Christianity support this view. In his second epistle, Peter reminds believers that “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (The Holy Bible, 2 Peter 3:8). In the perspective of eternity, measurements like days and years have little meaning.
Another work that deals with eternity from a theological perspective is The Divine Comedy, a fictional journey that the Italian poet Dante Alighieri takes through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In his journey, Dante meets a myriad of characters from history, including Helen of Troy, Julius Caesar, and Pope Nicholas III. In Hell, many characters that have lived before Dante’s time call out to him, asking him to tell their friends and families of their fate. Being in eternity, the denizens of Hell have no sense of the present time in which Dante comes from. “Of your world in its present state, we have no evidence,” one soul says (Dante 14; “Inferno,” Canto X, ln. 96-97). “Therefore, when a thing is heard or seen which may hold the soul intently turned to it, the time goes by, and the man perceives it not,” Dante writes of Purgatory. (Dante 57; “Purgatory,” Canto IV, ln. 11). Since Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are the three eternities that all people in history are assigned to, time no longer has any meaning, yet the inhabitants are still deceived by their previous notion of time.
Kurt Vonnegut also illustrates how a human’s notion of time can be decieving in his novel Slaughter House-Five. As mentioned previously, the alien race of Tralfamadorians in the book see time in its entirety and not in just the present (Vonnegut 27). Since the main character Billy can only see one moment at a time via the present, the Tralfamadorians say that he is grossly deceived (Vonnegut 115). Since the Tralfamadorians see time in its entirety, time as Billy sees it becomes irrelevant. Time to them never changes, so there is no longer a past, present, or future. Everything is how it was, is, and will be, and it will never change. Therefore, any notions of time in terms of future, present and past are completely irrelevant.
While many thinkers thought in terms of future, present and past, some theologians and writers chose to think outside the finite world and into eternity. What they found was that time was the ultimate façade. The absolute time and the relative time of so many thinkers and writers was to them a mere speck in the eye of eternity.
Thinkers and writers have pondered and written many theories of time, but time itself has passed them by. Now, over two thousand years since time passed Plato by, we are still stuck with the vital question that St. Augustine posed: “What then is time?” Is it an immutable, unchanging force like Shakespeare thought? Is it a pliable servant as Einstein theorized? Or is it the biggest façade of human existence like the denizens of The Divine Comedy realized? Or, could time be something beyond our own understanding? Could it be something that even Albert Einstein could not compute, something Thomas Aquinas could not imagine, and something Kurt Vonnegut could not understand? The day may come when time’s true nature is revealed to mankind. Until then, thinkers and writers must continue to seek it. After all, time is a terrible thing to waste.
