Time Travel. A History

The Universe Rigid? Eliot in Four Quartets is not trying to persuade us of a system of the world. He suffers paradox and self-doubt. “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. / And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.” He speaks through masks. Not only are words slippery; the problem with using words to describe time is that words themselves are in

time. A string of words has a beginning, a middle, and an end. “Words move, music moves / Only in time.” Is eternity a place of motion or of stillness? Movement or pattern? Can these coexist? At the still point of the turning world? When he says a Chinese jar moves perpetually in its stillness, you know that’s a metonym. What moves perpetually in its stillness is a poem.^*4

You shall not think “the past is finished” or “the future is before us.”

Time does not belong to us; we cannot grasp it or define it. We can barely count it. The tolling bell, Eliot tells us,

Measures time not our time, run by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless.

—

WHEN BORGES, the philosopher poet, wrote that time is a river, he meant approximately the opposite. Time is not a river, nor is it a tiger, nor a fire. Borges, the critic, used a bit less paradox, a bit less misdirection. His language regarding time is apparently plain. In 1940 he, too, wrote about Dunne and his Experiment with Time, declaring it absurd, in a mild way. Part of Dunne’s argument was a reflection on consciousness—how it cannot be contemplated without falling into recursive loops (“a conscious subject is conscious not only of what it observes, but of a subject A that also observes and therefore, of another subject B that is conscious of A, and…” on and on). He was onto something important, recursion as an essential feature of consciousness, but then he concluded that “these innumerable intimate observers do not fit into the three dimensions of space, but they do in the no less numerous dimensions of time.” Borges knew this was nonsense, and it was his kind of nonsense. He saw something in it, a way to think about how the perception of time must be built on memory: “successive (or imaginary) states of the initial subject.” He recalled an observation made by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “If the spirit had to reflect on each thought, the mere perception of a sensation would cause it to think of the sensation and then to think of the thought and then of the thought of the thought, and so to infinity.” We create memories or our memories create themselves. Consulting a memory converts it into a memory of a memory. The memories of memories, the thoughts of thoughts, blend into one another until we cannot tease them apart. Memory is recursive and self-referential. Mirrors. Mazes.^*5

Dunne’s precognitive dreams and involuted logic led him to a belief in a preexisting future, an eternity within human reach. Borges said Dunne was making the mistake “those absentminded poets” make when they start to believe their own metaphors. By absentminded poets he seemed to mean physicists. By 1940 the new physics took the fourth dimension and the space-time continuum as real, but Borges emphatically did not:

Dunne is an illustrious victim of that bad intellectual habit—denounced by Bergson—of conceiving time as a fourth dimension of space. He postulates that the future toward which we must move already exists (also conceived in spatial form, in the form of a line or a river).^*6

Borges had more to say than most about the problem of time in the twentieth century. For him paradox was not a problem but a strategy. He believed in time—its reality, its centrality—yet he titled his crucial essay “A New Refutation of Time.” Of eternity he was not so fond. In another essay, “A History of Eternity,” he declared: “For us, time is a jarring, urgent problem, perhaps the most vital problem of metaphysics, while eternity is a game or a spent hope.” Everyone “knows” (said Borges) that eternity is the archetype and our time merely its fleeting image. He proposed the opposite: Time comes first; eternity is created in our minds. Time is the substance, eternity the effigy. Contrary to Plato—contrary to the Church—eternity is “more impoverished than the world.” If you are a scientist, you may substitute infinity. That is your creation, after all.