Authors: Alan Lightman
In the performing hall of the Stadttheater, a ballerina moves across the stage and takes to the air. She hangs for a moment and then alights on the floor.
Saut, batterie, saut
. Legs cross and flutter, arms unfold into an open arch. Now she prepares for a
pirouette
, right leg moving back to fourth position, pushing off on one foot, arms coming in to speed the turn. She is precision. She is a clock. In her mind, while she dances, she thinks she should have floated a little on one leap, but she cannot
float because her movements are not hers. Every interaction of her body with floor or with space is predetermined to a billionth of an inch. There is no room to float. To float would indicate a slight uncertainty, while there is no uncertainty. And so she moves around the stage with clocklike inevitability, makes no unexpected leaps or dares, touches down precisely on the chalk, does not dream of unplanned
cabrioles
.
In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
The chemist who works at the pharmaceutical on Kochergasse walks through the town on his afternoon break. He stops at the shop selling clocks on Marktgasse, buys a sandwich at the bakery next door, continues toward the woods and the river. He owes his friend money but prefers to buy himself presents. As he walks, admiring his new coat, he decides he can pay his friend back the next year, or perhaps never at all. And who can blame him? In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each
action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged. The chemist thinks all these thoughts as he steps along the path through the Brunngasshalde and breathes the moist air of the forest. He almost permits himself a smile, so pleased is he at his decision. He breathes the moist air and feels oddly free to do as he pleases, free in a world without freedom.
Sunday afternoon. People stroll down Aarstrasse, wearing Sunday clothes and full of Sunday dinner, speaking softly beside the murmur of the river. The shops are closed. Three women walk down Marktgasse, stop to read advertisements, stop to peer in windows, walk on quietly. An innkeeper scrubs his steps, sits and reads a paper, leans against the sandstone wall and shuts his eyes. The streets are sleeping. The streets are sleeping, and through the air there floats music from a violin.
In the middle of a room with books on tables, a young man
stands and plays his violin. He loves his violin. He makes a gentle melody. And as he plays, he looks out to the street below, notices a couple close together, looks at them with deep brown eyes, and looks away. He stands so still. His music is the only movement, his music fills the room. He stands so still and thinks about his wife and infant son, who occupy the room downstairs.
And as he plays, another man, identical, stands in the middle of a room and plays his violin. The other man looks to the street below, notices a couple close together, looks away, and thinks about his wife and son. And as he plays, a third man stands and plays his violin. Indeed, there are a fourth and fifth, there is a countless number of young men standing in their rooms and playing violins. There is an infinite number of melodies and thoughts. And this one hour, while the young men play their violins, is not one hour but many hours. For time is like the light between two mirrors. Time bounces back and forth, producing an infinite number of images, of melodies, of thoughts. It is a world of countless copies.
As he thinks, the first man feels the others. He feels their music and their thoughts. He feels himself repeated a thousand times, feels this room with books repeated a thousand times.
He feels his thoughts repeated. Should he leave his wife? What about that moment in the library of the polytechnic when she looked at him across the desk? What about her thick brown hair? But what comfort has she given him? What solitude, besides this hour to play his violin?
He feels the others. He feels himself repeated a thousand times, feels this room repeated a thousand times, feels his thoughts repeated. Which repetition is his own, his true identity, his future self? Should he leave his wife? What about that moment in the library of the polytechnic? What comfort has she given him? What solitude, besides this hour to play his violin? His thoughts bounce back and forth a thousand times between each copy of himself, grow weaker with each bounce. Should he leave his wife? What comfort has she given him? What solitude? His thoughts grow dimmer with each reflection. What comfort has she given him? What solitude? His thoughts grow dimmer until he hardly remembers what the questions were, or why. What solitude? He looks out to the empty street and plays. His music floats and fills the room, and when the hour passes that was countless hours, he remembers only music.
Every Tuesday, a middle-aged man brings stones from the quarry east of Berne to the masonry on Hodlerstrasse. He has a wife, two children grown and gone, a tubercular brother who lives in Berlin. He wears a gray wool coat in all seasons, works in the quarry until after dark, has dinner with his wife and goes to bed, tends his garden on Sundays. And on Tuesday mornings, he loads his truck with stones and comes to town.
When he comes, he stops on Marktgasse to purchase flour and sugar. He spends a half hour sitting quietly in the back
pew of St. Vincent’s. He stops at the Post Bureau to send a letter to Berlin. And as he passes people on the street, his eyes are on the ground. Some people know him, try to catch his eye or say hello. He mumbles and walks on. Even when he delivers his stones to Hodlerstrasse, he cannot look the mason in the eye. Instead, he looks aside, he talks to the wall in answer to the mason’s friendly chatter, he stands in a corner while his stones are weighed.
Forty years ago in school, one afternoon in March, he urinated in class. He could not hold it in. Afterwards, he tried to stay in his chair, but the other boys saw the puddle and made him walk around the room, round and round. They pointed at the wet spot on his pants and howled. That day the sunlight looked like streams of milk as it poured whitely through the windows and spilled onto the floorboards of the room. Two dozen jackets hung from hooks beside the door. Chalk marks stretched across the blackboard, the names of Europe’s capitals. The desks had swivel tops and drawers. His had “Johann” carved in the upper right. The air was moist and close from the steam pipes. A clock with big red hands read 2:15. And the boys hooted at him, hooted at him as they chased him around the room, with the wet spot on his pants. They hooted and called him “bladder baby, bladder baby, bladder baby.”
That memory has become his life. When he wakes up in the morning, he is the boy who urinated in his pants. When he passes people on the street, he knows they see the wet spot on his pants. He glances at his pants and looks away. When his children visit, he stays within his room and talks to them through the door. He is the boy who could not hold it in.
But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
In a world of shifting past, one morning the quarryman awakes and is no more the boy who could not hold it in. That afternoon in March long gone was just another afternoon. On that afternoon forgotten, he sat in class, recited when the teacher called him, went skating with the other boys after school. Now he owns a quarry. He has nine suits of clothes. He buys fine pottery for his wife and takes long walks with her on Sunday afternoons. He visits friends on Amthausgasse and Aarstrasse, smiles at them and shakes their hand. He sponsors concerts at the Casino.
One morning he wakes up and …
As the sun rises over the city, ten thousand people yawn and
take their toast and coffee. Ten thousand fill the arcades of Kramgasse or go to work on Speichergasse or take their children to the park. Each has memories: a father who could not love his child, a brother who always won, a lover with a delicious kiss, a moment of cheating on a school examination, the stillness spreading from a fresh snowfall, the publication of a poem. In a world of shifting past, these memories are wheat in wind, fleeting dreams, shapes in clouds. Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant, when the sun streams over the Bernese Alps and the shopkeepers sing as they raise their awnings and the quarryman begins to load his truck.
“Stop eating so much,” says the grandmother, tapping her son on the shoulder. “You’ll die before me and who will take care of my silver.” The family is having a picnic on the bank of the Aare, ten kilometers south of Berne. The girls have finished their lunch and chase each other around a spruce tree. Finally dizzy, they collapse in the thick grass, lie still for a moment, then roll on the ground and get dizzy again. The son and his very fat wife and the grandmother sit on a blanket, eating smoked ham, cheese, sourdough bread with mustard, grapes,
chocolate cake. As they eat and drink, a gentle breeze comes over the river and they breathe in the sweet summer air. The son takes off his shoes and wiggles his toes in the grass.
Suddenly a flock of birds darts overhead. The young man leaps from the blanket and runs after them, without taking time to put on his shoes. He disappears over the hill. Soon he is joined by others, who have spotted the birds from the city.
One bird has alighted in a tree. A woman climbs the trunk, reaches out to catch the bird, but the bird jumps quickly to a higher branch. She climbs farther up, cautiously straddles a branch and creeps outward. The bird hops back to the lower branch. As the woman hangs helplessly up in the tree, another bird has touched down to eat seeds. Two men sneak up behind it, carrying a giant bell jar. But the bird is too fast for them and takes to the air, merging again with the flock.
Now the birds fly through the town. The pastor at St. Vincent’s Cathedral stands in the belfry, tries to coax the birds into the arched window. An old woman in the Kleine Schanze gardens sees the birds momentarily roost in a bush. She walks slowly toward them with a bell jar, knows she has no chance of entrapping a bird, drops her jar to the ground and begins weeping.
And she is not alone in her frustration. Indeed, each man and each woman desires a bird. Because this flock of nightingales is time. Time flutters and fidgets and hops with these birds. Trap one of these nightingales beneath a bell jar and time stops. The moment is frozen for all people and trees and soil caught within.
In truth, these birds are rarely caught. The children, who alone have the speed to catch birds, have no desire to stop time. For the children, time moves too slowly already. They rush from moment to moment, anxious for birthdays and new years, barely able to wait for the rest of their lives. The elderly desperately wish to halt time, but are much too slow and fatigued to entrap any bird. For the elderly, time darts by much too quickly. They yearn to capture a single minute at the breakfast table drinking tea, or a moment when a grandchild is stuck getting out of her costume, or an afternoon when the winter sun reflects off the snow and floods the music room with light. But they are too slow. They must watch time jump and fly beyond reach.
On those occasions when a nightingale is caught, the catchers delight in the moment now frozen. They savor the precise placement of family and friends, the facial expressions, the
trapped happiness over a prize or a birth or romance, the captured smell of cinnamon or white double violets. The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear, flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.
A clock tower strikes eight times in the distance. The young patent clerk lifts his head from his desk, stands up and stretches, walks to the window.
Outside, the town is awake. A woman and her husband argue as she hands him his lunch. A group of boys on their way to the gymnasium on Zeughausgasse throw a soccer ball back and forth and talk excitedly about the summer vacation. Two women walk briskly toward Marktgasse carrying empty shopping sacks.
Shortly, a senior patent officer comes in the door, goes to his desk and begins working, without saying a word. Einstein turns around and looks at the clock in the corner. Three minutes after eight. He fidgets with coins in his pocket.
At four minutes past eight, the typist walks in. She sees Einstein across the room holding his handwritten manuscript and she smiles. She has already typed several of his personal papers for him in her spare time, and he always gladly pays what she asks. He is quiet, though he sometimes tells jokes. She likes him.
Einstein gives her his manuscript, his theory of time. It is six minutes past eight. He walks to his desk, glances at the stack of files, goes over to a bookshelf, and starts to remove one of the notebooks. He turns and walks back to the window. The air is unusually clear for late June. Above an apartment building, he can see the tips of the Alps, which are blue with white tops. Higher up, the tiny black speck of a bird makes slow loops in the sky.
Einstein walks back to his desk, sits down for a moment, and then returns to the window. He feels empty. He has no interest in reviewing patents or talking to Besso or thinking of physics. He feels empty, and he stares without interest at the tiny black speck and the Alps.