Authors: Alan Lightman
When a man starts a business, he feels compelled to talk it over with his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, ad infinitum, to learn from their errors. For no new enterprise is new. All things have been attempted by some antecedent in the family tree. Indeed, all things have been accomplished. But at a price. For in such a world, the multiplication of achievements is partly divided by the diminishment of ambition.
And when a daughter wants guidance from her mother, she cannot get it undiluted. Her mother must ask her mother, who must ask her mother, and so on forever. Just as sons and daughters cannot make decisions themselves, they cannot turn to parents for confident advice. Parents are not the source of certainty. There are one million sources.
Where every action must be verified one million times, life is
tentative. Bridges thrust halfway over rivers and then abruptly stop. Buildings rise nine stories high but have no roofs. The grocer’s stocks of ginger, salt, cod, and beef change with every change of mind, every consultation. Sentences go unfinished. Engagements end just days before weddings. And on the avenues and streets, people turn their heads and peer behind their backs, to see who might be watching.
Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past. These few souls, with their dear relatives looking on, dive into Lake Constance or hurl themselves from Monte Lema, ending their infinite lives. In this way, the finite has conquered the infinite, millions of autumns have yielded to no autumns, millions of snowfalls have yielded to no snowfalls, millions of admonitions have yielded to none.
Suppose that time is not a quantity but a quality, like the luminescence of the night above the trees just when a rising moon has touched the treeline. Time exists, but it cannot be measured.
Just now, on a sunny afternoon, a woman stands in the middle of the Bahnhofplatz, waiting to meet a particular man. Some time ago, he saw her on the train to Fribourg, was entranced, and asked to take her to the Grosse Schanze gardens. From the urgency in his voice and the look in his eyes, the woman knew that he meant soon. So she waits for him, not
impatiently, passing the time with a book. Some time later, perhaps on the following day, he arrives, they lock arms, walk to the gardens, stroll by the groupings of tulips, roses, martagon lilies, alpine columbines, sit on a white cedar bench for an unmeasurable time. Evening comes, marked by a change in the light, a reddening of the sky. The man and woman follow a winding path of small white stones to a restaurant on a hill. Have they been together a lifetime, or only a moment? Who can say?
Through the leaded windows of the restaurant, the mother of the man spots him sitting with the woman. She wrings her hands and whines, for she wants her son at home. She sees him as a child. Has any time passed since he lived at home, played catch with his father, rubbed his mother’s back before bed? The mother sees that boyish laugh, caught in candlelight through the leaded windows of the restaurant, and she is certain that no time has passed, that her son, her child, belongs with her at home. She waits outside, wringing her hands, while her son grows older quickly in the intimacy of this evening, of this woman he has met.
Across the street, on Aarbergergasse, two men argue about a shipment of pharmaceuticals. The receiver is angry because
the pharmaceuticals, which have a short shelf life, have arrived aged and inactive. He expected them long ago and, in fact, has been waiting for them at the train station for some time, through comings and goings of the gray lady at no. 27 Spitalgasse, through many patterns of light on the Alps, through alterations of the air from warm to cool to wet. The sender, a short fat man with a mustache, is insulted. He crated the chemicals at his factory in Basle as soon as he heard the awnings open over the market. He carried the boxes to the train while the clouds were still in the same positions as when the contract was signed. What more could he do?
In a world where time cannot be measured, there are no clocks, no calendars, no definite appointments. Events are triggered by other events, not by time. A house is begun when stone and lumber arrive at the building site. The stone quarry delivers stone when the quarryman needs money. The barrister leaves home to argue a case at the Supreme Court when his daughter makes a joke about his growing bald. Education at the gymnasium in Berne is concluded when the student has passed his examinations. Trains leave the station at the Bahnhofplatz when the cars are filled with passengers.
In a world where time is a quality, events are recorded by the
color of the sky, the tone of the boatman’s call on the Aare, the feeling of happiness or fear when a person comes into a room. The birth of a baby, the patent of an invention, the meeting of two people are not fixed points in time, held down by hours and minutes. Instead, events glide through the space of the imagination, materialized by a look, a desire. Likewise, the time between two events is long or short, depending on the background of contrasting events, the intensity of illumination, the degree of light and shadow, the view of the participants.
Some people attempt to quantify time, to parse time, to dissect time. They are turned to stone. Their bodies stand frozen on street corners, cold, hard, and heavy. In time, these statues are taken to the quarryman, who cuts them up evenly in equal sections and sells them for houses when he needs the money.
On the corner of Kramgasse and Theaterplatz there is a small outdoor café with six blue tables and a row of blue petunias in the chef’s window box, and from this café one can see and hear the whole of Berne. People drift through the arcades on Kramgasse, talking and stopping to buy linen or wristwatches or cinnamon; a group of eight-year-old boys, let out for morning recess from the grammar school on Kochergasse, follow their teacher in single file through the streets to the banks of the Aare; smoke rises lazily from a mill just over the river; water
gurgles from the spouts of the Zähringer Fountain; the giant clock tower on Kramgasse strikes the quarter hour.
If, for the moment, one ignores the sounds and the smells of the city, a remarkable sight will be seen. Two men at the corner of Kochergasse are trying to part but cannot, as if they would never see each other again. They say goodbye, start to walk in opposite directions, then hurry back together and embrace. Nearby, a middle-aged woman sits on the stone rim of a fountain, weeping quietly. She grips the stone with her yellow stained hands, grips it so hard that the blood rushes from her hands, and she stares in despair at the ground. Her loneliness has the permanence of a person who believes she will never see other people again. Two women in sweaters stroll down Kramgasse, arm in arm, laughing with such abandon that they could be thinking no thought of the future.
In fact, this is a world without future. In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind. In this world, no person can imagine the future. Imagining the future is no more possible than seeing colors beyond violet: the senses cannot conceive what may lie past the visible end of the spectrum. In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is
final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction. They lie in their beds through the day, wide awake but afraid to put on their clothes. They drink coffee and look at photographs. Others leap out of bed in the morning, unconcerned that each action leads into nothingness, unconcerned that they cannot plan out their lives. They live moment to moment, and each moment is full. Still others substitute the past for the future. They recount each memory, each action taken, each cause and effect, and are fascinated by how events have delivered them to this moment, the last moment of the world, the termination of the line that is time.
In the little café with the six outdoor tables and the row of petunias, a young man sits with his coffee and pastry. He has been idly observing the street. He has seen the two laughing women in sweaters, the middle-aged woman at the fountain, the two friends who keep repeating goodbyes. As he sits, a dark rain cloud makes its way over the city. But the young man remains at his table. He can imagine only the present, and at
this moment the present is a blackening sky but no rain. As he sips the coffee and eats the pastry, he marvels at how the end of the world is so dark. Still there is no rain, and he squints at his paper in the dwindling light, trying to read the last sentence that he will read in his life. Then, rain. The young man goes inside, takes off his wet jacket, marvels at how the world ends in rain. He discusses food with the chef, but he is not waiting for the rain to stop because he is not waiting for anything. In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world. After twenty minutes, the storm cloud passes, the rain stops, and the sky brightens. The young man returns to his table, marvels that the world ends in sunlight.
In this world, time is a visible dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees, mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching off dimly into the far future. And just as one may choose whether to stay in one place or run to another, so one may choose his motion along the axis of time. Some people fear traveling far from a comfortable moment. They remain close to one temporal location, barely crawling past a familiar
occasion. Others gallop recklessly into the future, without preparation for the rapid sequence of passing events.
At the polytechnic in Zürich, a young man and his mentor sit in a small library, quietly discussing the young man’s doctoral work. It is the month of December, and a fire blazes in the fireplace with the white marble mantel. The young man and his teacher sit in pleasant oak chairs next to a round table, strewn with pages of calculations. The research has been difficult. Each month for the past eighteen months, the young man has met his professor here in this room, asked his professor for guidance and hope, gone away to work for another month, come back with new questions. The professor has always provided answers. Again today, the professor explains. While his teacher is speaking, the young man gazes out the window, studies the way snow clings to the spruce beside the building, wonders how he will manage on his own once he has received his degree. Sitting in his chair, the young man steps hesitantly forward in time, only minutes into the future, shudders at the cold and uncertainty. He pulls back. Much better to stay in this moment, beside the warm fire, beside the warm help of his mentor. Much better to stop movement in time. And so, on this day in the small library, the young man remains. His friends
pass by, look in briefly to see him stopped in this moment, continue on to the future at their own paces.
At no. 27 Viktoriastrasse, in Berne, a young woman lies on her bed. The sounds of her parents’ fighting drift up to her room. She covers her ears and stares at a photograph on her table, a photograph of herself as a child, squatting at the beach with her mother and father. Against one wall of her room stands a chestnut bureau. A porcelain wash basin sits on the bureau. The blue paint on the wall is peeling and cracked. At the foot of her bed, a suitcase is open, half-filled with clothes. She stares at the photograph, then out into time. The future is beckoning. She makes up her mind. Without finishing her packing, she rushes out of her house, this point of her life, rushes straight to the future. She rushes past one year ahead, five years, ten years, twenty years, finally puts on the brakes. But she is moving so fast that she cannot slow down until she is fifty years old. Events have raced by her vision and barely been seen. A balding solicitor who got her pregnant and then left. A blur of a year at the university. A small apartment in Lausanne for some period of time. A girlfriend in Fribourg. Scattered visits to her parents gone gray. The hospital room where her mother died. The damp apartment in Zürich, smelling of garlic, where her
father died. A letter from her daughter, living somewhere in England.
The woman catches her breath. She is fifty years old. She lies on her bed, tries to remember her life, stares at a photograph of herself as a child, squatting at the beach with her mother and father.
It is Tuesday morning in Berne. The thick-fingered baker on Marktgasse is shouting at a woman who has not paid her last bill, is flailing his arms while she quietly puts her new purchase of zwieback in her bag. Outside the baker’s shop, a child is skating after a ball tossed from a first-floor window, the child’s skates clicking on the stone street. On the east end of Marktgasse, where the street joins Kramgasse, a man and woman are standing close in the shadow of an arcade. Two men are walking past with newspapers under their arms. Three hundred
meters to the south, a warbler is flying lazily over the Aare.
The world stops.
The baker’s mouth halts in mid-sentence. The child floats in mid-stride, the ball hangs in the air. The man and woman become statues under the arcade. The two men become statues, their conversation stopped as if the needle of a phonograph had been lifted. The bird freezes in flight, fixed like a stage prop suspended over the river.
A microsecond later, the world starts again.
The baker continues his harangue as if nothing had happened. So, too, the child races after the ball. The man and woman press closer together. The two men continue debating the rise in the beef market. The bird flaps its wings and continues its arc over the Aare.
Minutes later, the world stops again. Then starts again. Stops. Starts.