time

Orawskie Lato

Today was an annual festival here in Jablonka — the thirtieth year in a row. That means they began having the festival just a few years before I first arrived. When we’re in Poland, we usually get at least to drop in on this festival.

This year, I saw several former students from those early days. Except for one, I didn’t recognize any of them immediately. I had to ask their name. When a bearded man in his mid-thirties approaches you, you’ll be forgiven if you don’t recognize him as the former student you last saw at age eighteen.

February Evening

I head out for a walk with the dog as I listen to one of Sam Harris’s latest editions of the Waking Up podcast in which he discusses the nature of time with physicist Frank Wilczek. We like to think of time as this little moving slice of now that’s passing through the past into the future, but it’s really not like that at all. Time in a sense is the measure of change, and basically clocks things that change predictably and regularly against which we mark the seeming passing of time. In that sense, then, everything that changes is a clock, Wilczek points out.

Everything is a clock. I stopped in mid-stride to think about that. It’s so profound and yet so simple at the same time, an observation that’s been staring us in the face all our lives but eluding us at the same time. Simple, elegant.

As I continue my walk, I pass a man standing in his garage talking on the phone. I raise my hand in greeting. It’s a Southern thing — we wave at everyone — but he doesn’t wave back. “Perhaps he didn’t see me,” I think. Then, noticing some of the flags hanging in his garage indicating a political persuasion diametrically opposed to mine, a little thought experiment begins in my head. “What if we could read each other’s minds? We’d know where the other stands on so many issues that we otherwise keep to ourselves. We’d really, truly know one another. Would we be less likely to wave at each other?” And that’s a terrifying thought.

About this time, I grow tired of the podcast and switch to a playlist I’ve created called “Nostalgia” — songs to induce just that. The first song up: “Private Universe” by Crowded House. What a strangely perfect song. It’s not at all about the private universe I’ve been contemplating, but what a coincidence. Private universes — the physicists’ idea of a multiverse is a reality, because we all live in our own private universe. It sounds lonely, but it’s much more comfortable for us to live in these little walled-off universes because they afford some privacy that a non-private, evening-walk-thought-experiment mind-reading universe would render impossible. Even if that means we never truly know one another, it’s better in our private universes. We’re passing our experiences and memories, emotions and impulses through our own filters as we share them with others who then pass them through their interpretive filters. There are so many layers separating us that it’s a miracle we can claim to know anyone at all.

But there’s a hint of tragedy in this, because even with those with whom we’d be most willing to share such a non-private universe, it’s impossible. I will never truly know my children because of all the things they don’t, won’t, or can’t share with me, and they will never really know me. In a sense, we live with strangers, each and every one of us. The only thing we truly have in common is the fate that awaits us all — when the clock that is our body wears down and stops recording time for us as conscious individuals and begins to be a measure of unconscious decay.

It’s about this time that the next song comes on: Billy Joel’s “Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel).” This song has always made me think of Natalia, a student I taught in Poland who died before her senior year in the summer of 1999. “That’s almost 22 years ago now,” I think. “Had she not died, she’d now be old enough to have children older than she was when she died.” The song winds down:

Someday we’ll all be gone
But lullabies go on and on
They never die
That’s how you
And I will be

How did I never notice that nod to mortality at the end of the song? And how is it that a talk about physics can end with such nostalgia? I feel like I should have an answer, but I also feel like none is needed. I’ve done what I set out to do: record some thoughts I had one February evening as I walk our silly dog, and that’s really all this is for. Billy Joel writes his songs that will never die; I write a blog a decade after they ceased being hip.

For Granted

This evening, K and I finished out the day watching Iris, a film about the British writer Iris Murdoch. I know little about Murdoch, and I’ve never read any of her work, but the film stars Dame Judi Dench, so I thought it couldn’t be that bad, and it really wasn’t. Dench does a good job, as always, and it’s a tough thing, I would imagine, portraying a lively mind sinking into Alzheimer’s. It got me to research Murdoch, though, and I found a curious quote attributed to her about marriage:

I have a strong memory of an interview between Murdoch and the writer A.N. Wilson in which, when asked about her marriage, she replied: “Oh well; I love, and am loved.” She also informed Wilson that the benefit of marriage is being able to take the other for granted. (Source)

The article is entitled “The secrets of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley’s unconventional marriage,” and the article reveals that “She was apparently very sexual, and not only with John; he, perhaps, was less interested in matters carnal.” In short, she had multiple affairs, apparently fairly openly, throughout their marriage. In the film, Murdoch says to Bayley early in their romance, when he has just discovered her unfaithfulness, which she freely admits, that he just has to accept her as she is. She’s not willing to change for him, in other words. While that might be admirable in some areas, in sexual promiscuity I find it a bit selfish, and I found myself wondering at the end of the film if that’s what she meant in the interview (I researched as the film uncoiled) about being able to “take the other for granted.”

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I take so much for granted it’s not even humorous in the slightest. I take for granted that I will have a dry place to stay when the rain pours and pours as it has for the last several days. I take it for granted that I will walk up and see my wife and children in the morning and carry on my life like normal. I take for granted that I can slip downstairs late one evening, occasionally light a cigar and pour a little libation, and write.

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I take for granted that my family will have food to eat, and that if, after returning home from inspecting the neighborhood during a let-up in the downpour, we decide to have mac and cheese for lunch, that we can do just that. And I take for granted that I can take all these things for granted.

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And that is probably why I have always been somewhat obsessed by time and its passing. Like so many others, I get into the habit of taking things for granted, and when they come to an end, as this year is or as our extended holiday break is, I realize unconsciously that I’ve taken it for granted and not made the most of it. At least I did. Having children changed that to a degree

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I learned to be aware of each passing moment because it was just that, a passing moment. This is especially true since the birth of E. The Girl’s first years showed me how one can grow accustomed to — take for granted — the little quirks a child exhibits as she grows and then suddenly, one realizes that the child has outgrown that quirk.

Now I’m still obsessed with time, but the obsession has changed. No longer do I find myself thinking, “This wonderful experience is ending, and I’m not sure anything coming will ever be as magnificent as this,” for that was how I framed my taking-for-granted nature. Instead, I find myself shocked at how quickly time as passed, regretting slightly the moments I’ve taken for granted and more determined not to do it any more.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Herbert W. Armstrong

Twenty-five years ago today there was a death that only a few thousand true believers and former true believers even remember, let alone know anything about. There are of course a few specialists — historians of religion and theologians — that would remember this man or know anything about it.

Herbert Armstrong died on January 19, 1986. He was the founder and leader of the church I grew up in, and his death came both as a shock and an expected consequence of age: he was 93 years old.

I remember his death; I remember his life; I find myself compelled to mention it. In that regard, I am hardly alone: there are dozens of bloggers writing about the same thing today. They’re rehearsing for the millionth time how he made false predictions (Armageddon was scheduled to begin during World War II, in 1972, and by 2005), how he lived in a palatial mansion and wore hand-tailored while his followers gave ridiculous amounts of their income (minimum of 10% of one’s gross salary plus offerings) to his church, how he was accused of some fairly awful things (which are certainly unprovable but highly suspect given the amount of circumstantial evidence).

Yet what strikes me about today — yet again — is how quickly time has passed since then, how insignificantly short twenty-five years can be.

This is most noticeable when thinking about music. I think of the music I grew up on, the music that was freshly released while I was in junior high and high school:

  • Boston’s Third Stage
  • U2’s Joshua Tree
  • REM’s Green
  • Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason

This is music that today’s teens consider “old music.” I think of how little time seems to have passed between the release of those albums and the present moment. It doesn’t feel like two and a half decades; the music doesn’t sound that old. And yet.

During high school, I was much more interested in “old” music myself:

  • Genesis’s albums when Peter Gabriel was still fronting the band.
  • The Grateful Dead
  • Pink Floyd
  • The Beatles

Now I stand in the same relationship to the music I grew up with as my teachers stood to Pink Floyd and the Beatles: twenty-plus years in the past (“It was twenty years ago today…”) yet feeling like yesterday (fill in the Beatles allusion for yourself).

And so I look back at the death of Herbert Armstrong realizing that it was an insignificant blink of time ago. Less than the flit of an eyelash in the grand scale of time. And not such a big chunk of time as twenty-five years seemed when I was thirteen and Armstrong died.

38

27+11

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg recently wrote of turning twenty-seven on the eleventh of January. Twenty-seven and the creator of software that has literally changed the world. Must be a good birthday.

Two days later, it’s my turn. Twenty-seven. Plus eleven.

Twenty-seven seems so very distant. It was 2000, and I lived in Boston. I was about to give up on my minimal religious studies work at Boston University and had just begun working for a start-up. My return to Poland was still a year off, and I was in a self-imposed limbo.

Eleven years later, I’m back in the classroom, and still spending too much time on the computer. Yet I’m infinitely more content, and how could I not be? I’m married, and we have a beautiful daughter.

As I approach forty, I find myself smiling at Mullenweg’s comment about twenty-seven:

27 is a really awkward age – I’m not young anymore but still before the looming 30. It’s inbetween.

Thirty looms for him; forty for me. So many I should give both of us some advice: starting a new decade is easier if you do it in style. I suggest a glance at my own thirtieth birthday.

My closest friends were there.

30th Birthday Party II

I’d hired a DJ (who was also a student) to play music I’d supplied (it was, after all, my birthday), so the party itself was a blast.

30th Birthday Party XI

Great friends; great music; great time.

Turning thirty was a snap. I anticipate the same thing in two years. And if I’m lucky, I’ll get a few “Lordy! Lordy! Look who’s forty!” birthday cards.

For now, as a warm up to forty, there’s bigos for dinner:

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Cheese cake for dessert:

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And a wildly active — which means a wildly healthy — daughter.

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And then there’s this to look forward to: