Funny How Time Slips…and Falls at the Pool, and then Sues
By Greg Evans
NEW YORK, NY - New York Daily News Columnist, Jimmy Breslin, once wrote, "The truth is, time marches on and you have two choices: You move forward, come what may, and you experience all the sour and sweet things that fly at you from around corners, or you sit still. Don't sit still".
Novelist Franz Kafka said, “Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.”
Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury, vexed over and wrote often about time. “Clocks slay time; time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life". He was exploring the grapple between immediate life experience versus an artificial measure of chronology.
Willie Nelson too, “It’s funny how time slips away.”
What is it about time they, and everyone is trying so hard to make sense of?
Trying to define time is as complicated and perplexing as trying to manipulate it. There are manifold ways to define time. Many have tried to do so. What is this mysterious concept that impacts everything and everybody, or does it? I have endured many sleepless nights thinking about the myriad topics kindred to time and I am neither a philosopher nor a scientist, yet I have my own loose-legged conclusions. To personally define time, based on my own hypothesis, I would prudently illustrate it as the fluid, malleable, yet uninterrupted heartbeat of the universe, but a variable in an equation that helps to shape this so-called universe. I think the universe consists of different components such as gravity, matter (light, materials, metals, atoms, anything that constitutes anything), electricity, energy, noise, & time. And maybe there are other variables as well? I like to think of it as analogous to the composition of the human body. Time is the heart, gravity is the circulatory system, light is the eyes and your sight, energy is taste and the digestive system, electricity is your nervous system, weird noises are reproduction, and God is your brain, the architect of your life, and so forth. That is just my own personal take on it to help me try and understand this complex and bizarre world. But the variable that interests me most, is time.
Faulkner defined time as "A fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people".
Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher who once said, “Know Thyself,” “Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth,” and “I know that I know nothing,” defined time as a phenomenon of motion. He viewed time in the sense of its value. “Beware the barrenness of a busy life,” he said. Ferris Bueller in the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, echoes this sentiment at the conclusion of the movie, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.” Einstein recognized this saying that time is not absolute. It depends on your frame of reference (the rate at which time passes depends on your motion). Socrates lived in the late 4th century, dying on February 15, 399, forced by the rabble to commit suicide (ending his time on earth) because he was a genius far ahead of his time (the olden-olden days) and absurdly charged with corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens. One of the main prosecutors in taking away Socrates’s remaining precious time on earth was a sleazy, intellectually inferior Athenian lawyer and weak amateur poet, with a nose that resembled a beak, named Meletus. Socrates will be remembered forever. Nobody remembers Meletus. I didn’t even know who he was before reading about Socrates. The practice of humans taking time away from other humans in the form of punishment and death is peculiar and as common as cheese pizza.
I bring up Socrates because over a thousand years before Einstein worked to prove that time and motion were correlated, Socrates also pondered this concept. Both Socrates and Einstein turned to reason (the opposite of the status-quo thinking throughout most of history, by the general public) endeavoring to understand the true esoteric meaning of time based on, more or less, the subtext of God’s “book of life.” When Einstein’s baby sister was born, he asked, “Where are her wheels?” Einstein would see an infant in a stroller, maybe at the grocery store or out for a stroll, so Einstein used reason to try and understand, and so he assumed that the wheels were part of the infant, like legs. Even as a child he was analyzing the world around him and trying to make sense of it instead of just living in it.
The same is true for Socrates. Though he lived thousands of years ago, he beheld the world not much different than we do today. When asked about men seeking marriage, Socrates responded in jest, “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”Tolstoy echoed that empirical evidence of human nature as well, “All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These are existential observations of people who are living in the present moment. The idea is that, generally speaking, a person’s station in life (as an adult anyway) came from their personal freedom to choose their path, their individual responsibility to make a choice that a particular cross-road in their life and therefore, where they find themselves, was determined by decisions they made over a period of time.
Both Einstein and Socrates saw the world as it is, and that the answers to many of the questions they had could possiblyexist in the present if you just looked closely enough.
The Lakota subscribe to a similar philosophy, whereby they embrace the beauty of the moment and see time not as the ticking of a clock, but polychronically by managing their day-to-day responsibilities without the burden of recording minutes and seconds. The artificial use of time is as alien to them as the destruction of the land. Minutes and seconds are fluid like the movement of the planets and stars across the heavens.
Elvis Presley lived in the present too. He was forced to by fame. Every woman in 1950 and beyond fall madly in love with him. It is well documented that young men in the 1950’s, were wildly jealous of Elvis. Teenage and young adult men would show up at his concerts and start riots. In Lubbock, Texas, a coterie of resentful men fire-bombed Elvis’s car. At the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, in 1956, at least 100 National Guardsmen were on hand to prevent unrest from green-eyed boyfriends and husbands. Also, the parents of young women viewed him as a symbol of teenage rebellion and someone that must be swiftly repressed, even by extreme measures. Then, again in 1956, in Jacksonville, Florida, Elvis was absurdly charged with corrupting the minds of the American youth by a hysterical judge. Elvis was labeled a “savage!” and threatened with arrest. Elvis is germane to our theme because he capitalized on human nature which has changed little despite the passage of time. Ideas, technology, practices, etc. change, but human nature is as constant as time itself.
Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th and 21st centuries said in a lecture that the evidence we have at this point in time indicates that the universe has a beginning and did not exist forever as some people believe. In the lecture published by the Stephen Hawking Estate, Hawking explained that he believed the universe started around 15 billion years ago. Essentially that would be when time as we know it, began as well. The question then arises, will it all one-day end? The laws of nature seem to lean toward everything has a beginning and an end. Hawking described “the end,” coming when the universe re-collapses. What then? It is hard for us to wrap our minds around such a phenomenal event taking place. Not only that, would there still be humans alive on Earth or somewhere else in the solar system or galaxy when this truly occurs if it is something that will someday occur?
One day in 2002, Hawking’s protégé, Thomas Hertog, received a message from his mentor Stephen Hawking to hurry over to his room. Hawking said to him, “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.” Essentially Hawking was stating that his groundbreaking book on time which had sold over 10 million copies was no longer relevant. Hertog explained that he and Hawking had a new perspective that reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics and is “profoundly Darwinian” in spirit. For this error, everyone who purchased the book got a refund and Hawking was promptly fired by his publisher. Just kidding; no refunds and no public executions. The new idea rejects the old one that the universe is a machine of sorts that is governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence. The new concept explores the universe as a kind of self-organizing entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics. (This information can be read in more depth in Robin McKie’s 2023 article published by The Guardian).
The fact that Hawking revised his belief of time and the universe, is not unique or jaw-dropping. In 1663, John Ray (1627-1705) was admiring a buried forest at Bruges which had once been a forest floor, then the sea floor, and again the forest floor. Ray realized that such changes would have to take an exorbitant amount of time. In puzzlement, he says, “It is a strange thing; considering the novity of the world, the age whereof, according to the usual account, is not yet 5,600 years.” In 1663, the great scientists of the day believed the world was maybe around 5,600 years old. We know today that this estimation would change as technology advanced and made it easier to conduct such difficult research.
Charles Darwin also recognized how things change (or evolve) over time. Darwin saw the power of the process of natural selection over significant stretches of time. The ultimate desire to survive, along with the passage of time, encourages nature to revise its creations like a sculptor or painter trying to fix discrepancies in the art, searching for perfection, which science calls evolution, and the passing down of genetics to help living organisms survive or else they will become extinct.
In 1835, Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands where for five weeks he observed and analyzed the unique wildlife he came across and was particularly interested in species that were similar to mainland species but showed distinct physical characteristics that were different.
He also noticed that the characteristics of species on the Galapagos varied even from similar species on nearby islands and he wondered if the mainland species had adapted to their new environments over time.
The thing about trying to define time is that everything from the earth forming in the Bible (6 days and one for rest) or Darwin’s belief that the world as we know it, took millions or billions of years to evolve, revolves around time. Obviously, time is critical in any argument involving creation and therefore, maybe to better understand God, we have to better understand time. We are slowly learning more and more about the mechanics of time, but we seem to know that it is a mysterious force-like entity incapable of stopping, except for a photograph, when you press pause on the TV, and stare at a picture of the past, or while trying to make through an intermediate taxation class.
It’s fairly safe to assume that had Darwin been alive and working during the time of Jesus, he would have ended up on a cross right beside JC with that rakehell Pontius Pilate standing below them, jabbing at them with a spear. Fast-forward a thousand or so years. Had Darwin been running his mouth about evolution and touting his Origin of Species book back in February 1692 – May 1693, in Salem, Massachusetts, he would have no doubt found himself before the panel of porky, blood-thirsty judges, none of them with any formal legal training, including Samuel Sewall, William Stoughton, John Hathorne, Nathaniel Saltonstall; and been ruthlessly convicted on false pretenses of being a warlock, paraded with Sarah Wildes, Elizabeth Howe, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Sarah Good, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, George Burroughs, John Proctor, John Willard, Ann Pudeator, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Martha Corey, Mary Eastey, and Wilmott Redd up to Gallows Hill to have his neck mercilessly stretched.
Time has always just gone by, a natural disaster here and there like the eruption of a volcano like Mount Vesuvius, a ground-shaking earthquake such as Valdivia, a Tsunami that drowns entire islands, an asteroid crashing to the earth, or something so devastating it could literally change the biodiversity, but nature has always, for the most part, been able to correct itself. All the real weirdness didn’t come about until intelligent humans began to crave gold and power, hierarchies were established and soon the natural world had to contend with these “ancient alien invaders”, like locusts eating everything in sight but can never seem to be satisfied. The burlesque use of the word alien is polysemic. Despite the variety of disasters that have shaped the earth and the world over billions of years, nothing compares to the transformation undertaken at the hands of humankind.
It isn’t time that changes anything; things change over time. One could argue that all humans change things, but that may also be not totally accurate. Take the Hawaiian Islands, for example. This collection of 137 islets, and atolls is arguably the most beautiful tropical location on the planet. The island, although inhabited for thousands of years, never changed much until European Captain James Cook sailed into Waimea Bay and made landfall on the rocky beach on the island of Kaua’i in 1778, only then, first changing the course of the island’s history and that of the people, then the landscape. For thousands of years the people lived as one with the island, in harmony with nature. A year after Cook “discovered,” Hawaii, he was murdered at Kealakekua Bay after getting stabbed to death when he tried to take the king hostage. Before Europeans arrived in the Hawaiian Islands, there were no mosquitos, firearms, and diseases like smallpox, leprosy, measles, influenza, syphilis, gonorrhea, whooping cough, and tuberculosis, which decimated the population. By 1890, the native population had decreased to around 10% of its original size. They also experienced forced religious conversion, commercialization of the land, cultural disruption, and the inevitable overthrow of their monarchy government which took place in 1893, when sugar and pineapple corporations overthrew Queen Liliuokalani.
Rewind nearly two hundred years before that and you have a similar type of situation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A land of windswept beaches, lush forests, and swamps teeming with Native Americans who had lived there for centuries, in harmony with the earth. It is the subject an entire volume of books could be written but the premise could remain how things change over time. Consequently, the Europeans found the Native American people and their culture intolerable, calling them “savages,” stealing their land, killing and relocating them, and colonizing the land at will. Though tragic, this is a great example of how two different human civilizations existed over time.
As a modern intelligent society, we look back into time to try and understand humanity. Until fairly recently the modern world embraced human existence coming into existence in the “Fertile Crescent,” the Middle Eastern region encompassing Israel, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, northern Egypt, Kuwait, parts of Turkey (probably as far as Hattusa), Iran and Cyprus. Others argue humans first evolved in different parts of central to east Africa.
In the Christian faith, humanity started with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Ancient gossip reveals assumptions that the Garden of Eden was where the city of Damascus, capital of Syria stands today. In 1867, 31-year-old Mark Twain set sail with a group of well-educated fellow Christians in search of their spiritual roots. The group planned to travel around the world stopping periodically to tour the local spots, and to enjoy the culture and cuisine.
They eventually reached Syria and humped through an unforgiving desert to the outskirts of Damascus which Twain described as insanely quixotic and one of the most beautiful sights the human eyeball could ever visually touch. It is said the prophet Muhammad had a similar experience, gazing upon the beautiful view of the city with wonder. Again, it is an instance where everything is relative despite the great span of time that separated the two experiences.
Damascus is said to be the oldest city in the world, founded by Uz, the great-grandson of Noah through Shem. Twain says, “Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was “always” a Damascus.” It was from the ancient historian Flavius Josephus that the founding of Damascus is attributed to Uz.
Twain references the biblical story of Noah in his memoir, The Innocents Abroad, and how Uz stood in the desert staring down at the hypnotic city. However, we also know today, according to cuneiform tablets translated by the great Dr. Finkel, that the story of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood was not original to the Old Testament of the Bible, but in fact, stemmed from a traditional story passed down through generations dating as far back as the Mesopotamians and their own flood myth centering around a figure called Atrahasis, who was instructed and given instructions by God to build his own, circular reed Ark.
By no means is that statement saying that the Bible was wrong in any way about the story or that anything is fake. Instead, it shows how potential real-life stories shaped people’s lives then, and still do today. Time has not dulled it.
I wonder if Atrahasis was also given instructions on how to build a pool. If someone slipped, back then, would they sue? How times have changed and yet the world has stayed the same. And when everything gets too convoluted, people have often turned to the Bible for answers.
The Bible is one of the greatest books ever written. Some may whatever grievance might be had against it, but one thing that can be agreed upon is that no book has been so extraordinary as to stand the test of time, with such a command over the global population than the Bible. Genesis, the first book of the Bible, opens with the Hebrew word bereshit, which translates to “the beginning.” The beginning is when the clock starts. Time. Time institutes the start of the world. Was it a big bang, a whistle, a pop as if from a starter pistol at a track meet, a screaming birth, or did everything just begin, silently, magnanimously, the total beginning of the weirdest and most inexplicable story ever to be told. That of the human race.
In the book of Genesis, God creates the earth in six days and takes the seventh day to rest. Hence, the evolution of “the week.” Wayne Jackson of the Christian Courier wrote a piece that explores time in the biblical sense explaining that the Scriptures define time based on the “temporal,” and the “eternal.” In Corinthians 4:18, Paul says that things that you can see are temporal, whereas that which you cannot see are eternal. He also throws us a curve ball with this line, “Eternity is endless, but time is measured by a “beginning,” and an “end.”
Ben Jonson, contemporary of William Shakespeare, once said of Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time.” He was referring to the genius of Shakespeare as being relevant forever, but if time has a beginning and an end, then he isn’t necessarily for “all time,” but for “our time,” human history, and then it is over. I know I am being knit-picky and overstretching a bit here, but it shows how complicated the idea of time can get and has become. Every civilization in history has tried to make sense of time in their own time. We can already somewhat manipulate time in the sense of medical care, eating healthy and getting more exercise, we are extending time. Humans have understood well throughout history how to end someone’s time, through acts of unspeakable violence. What happens when we can start manipulating time artificially?
In my life I have experienced a fairly broad religious buffet having been baptized twice (once Catholic, once Methodist), confirmed (Methodist), spent a year in a Catholic college (Manhattan College), introduced to Judaism by my uncle, participated in Jewish holidays and ceremonies, and worked for two years at a Presbyterian-affiliated college (King University).
Religion, the creation of the Bible, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and understanding of the omnipotence of God, even for the pious, are somewhat of an enigma – as much so as time itself. Some people might argue that God is time and time is God. Maybe. Who is to say one way or the other? But if that is true, what is the real reason behind the mechanics of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Why does it exist? What is the benefit of it that impacts mother nature? What is the point of everything, of us, here living and breathing on earth? People ask that question all the time. But I don’t really think it matters why or what the point is. What matters is what you do with your time while you are here, regardless of “why” you are here. We have families that we love and enjoy spending time with, beautiful art, delicious food, extraordinary music, exotic places with crystal clear oceans, glistening snow-capped mountains, the tranquility and peacefulness of the forest, whatever it is that ignites your senses and touches your soul. That is the point. And that is all that matters.