Time/Space

¨To be sure, it is difficult to imagine that any of the sciences could treat time as a mere abstraction. Yet, for a great number of those who, for their own purposews, chop it up into arbitrarily homogenous segments, time is nothing more than a measurement. In contrast, historical time is a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It´s the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.¨
--Marc Bloch, French historian and Resistant, in his essay The Historians Craft, written while he was in hiding shortly before he was killed by the Nazis


Because it´s early evening and I´m listening to Cesaria Evora, I´m bound to say that life is beautiful. I was lying on my sofa a little earlier, in the late afternoon, staring up at the patch of deep blue sky peaking through between the buildings, and lost in thought, I had the feeling that this whole city was buoying me on all sides, that I was floating just imperceptibly off the ground. I have wonderful friends here and I enjoy teaching and I jet all over this enormous city and someone never feel lost.

It´s strange to think that you´re just one person in six million (or six billion for that matter) and that each other person on this planet experiences their life as forcefully and immediately as you do yours. The world doesn´t seem big enough to contain so much living. I think the Thomas Friedmans of the world are wrong: the world feels bigger than ever because we´re better prepared to understand the unique experiences of its six billion people.

I read that strange article in the New York Times today about the lawsuit against CERN alleging that the new particle accelerator could create a black hole and swallow the earth. Having been raised on a steady diet of Twilight Zone marathons (not to mention having been a closet Star Trek fan for most of middle school), I imagined the possibilities: time travel, non-linear time, space exploration. What if time didn´t exist anymore? We could make ourselves into not just anyone but everyone we´ve ever wanted to be: I wouldn´t have to choose between graduate school and activism, or living on a communal farm or in a Buddhist monastery, or being a writer or a teacher or a dancer or any of the other things I´ve ever dreamed of. . . each non-moment in non-time would branch out in an infinite number of directions and so on and so forth.

This fantasy of time appeals to me because I often feel that my body is too weak to contain my energies and ambitions: if I had my way, I would organize and write all day long, moving forward and looking inward, and dance all night, sleep to dream for several hours at dawn, and do it all again the next day. Our physical limitations impose on us the discipline to choose: what will sustain us in the long term? But I´m a restless person. Even when I´m resting, I´m working on something or other. Where did this need to justify my existence come from, I wonder?