{"id":146734,"date":"2020-08-11T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-11T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=146734"},"modified":"2020-08-11T10:41:43","modified_gmt":"2020-08-11T14:41:43","slug":"the-unreality-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/08\/11\/the-unreality-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unreality of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Allen \/ Adobe Stock.<\/p><\/div>\n

I was listening to an episode of the BBC podcast In Our Time<\/em>, on which a group of English scholars was discuss\u00ading the French philosopher Henri Bergson, when one of them mentioned an essay called \u201cThe Unreality of Time,\u201d originally published in 1908, by a philosopher named John McTaggart. The phrase startled me\u2014I was writing a book called The Unreality of Memory<\/em>. It\u2019s possible I\u2019d heard the title before and forgotten I knew it\u2014as the scholars note, it is a famous essay. (\u201cIs forgotten knowledge knowledge all the same?\u201d is the kind of question we asked in my col\u00adlege philosophy classes.) In any case, I had never read it. I paused the podcast and found the essay online, curious what I\u2019d been referencing.<\/p>\n

McTaggart does not use \u201cunreality\u201d in the same way I do, to describe a quality of seeming<\/em> unrealness in some\u00adthing I assume to be real. Instead, his paper sets out to prove that time literally does not exist. \u201cI believe that time is unreal,\u201d he writes. The paper is interesting (\u201cTime only belongs to the existent\u201d \u2026 \u201cThe only way in which time can be real is by existing\u201d) but not convincing.<\/p>\n

McTaggart\u2019s argument hinges in part on his claim that perception is \u201cqualitatively different\u201d from either memory or anticipation\u2014this is the difference between past, pres\u00adent, and future, the way we apprehend events in time. Direct perceptions are those that fall within the \u201cspecious present,\u201d a term coined by E.\u2009R. Clay and further devel\u00adoped by William James (a fan of Bergson\u2019s). \u201cEverything is observed in a specious present,\u201d McTaggart writes, \u201cbut nothing, not even the observations themselves, can ever be in a specious present.\u201d It\u2019s illusory\u2014the events are fixed, and there is nothing magically different about \u201cthe pres\u00adent\u201d as a point on a timeline. This leads to an irresolvable contradiction, to his mind. <\/p>\n

Bergson, for his part, believed that memory and percep\u00adtion were the same, that they occur simultaneously: \u201cThe pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devour\u00ading the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.\u201d He thought this explained the phenomenon of de\u0301ja\u0300 vu\u2014when you feel something is happening that you\u2019ve experi\u00adenced before, it\u2019s because a glitch has allowed you to notice the memory forming in real time. The memory\u2014le souvenir du pre\u0301sent<\/em>\u2014is attached not to a particular moment in the past but to the past in general. It has a past-\u00adlike feeling; with that comes an impression one knows the future.<\/p>\n

Bergson was hugely popular in the early twentieth century. He was friends with Marcel Proust\u2014and married to Proust\u2019s cousin\u2014and his ideas influenced many other Modernist writers and artists. He is less well-\u00adknown and celebrated now in part because of a years-long debate with Albert Einstein over the nature of time. Bergson believed that \u201cclock-\u00adtime\u201d and what he called capital-T Time\u2014time as we experience it, a lived duration\u2014were en\u00adtirely different. It was this other kind of time, time in the mind, that interested Bergson. Einstein thought this was poppycock. \u201cIl n\u2019y a donc pas un temps des philosophes<\/em>,\u201d he said on April 22, 1922, at an infamous lecture in Paris: There is no philosophers\u2019 time. Einstein felt his theory of relativity was the final word\u2014time is what clocks measure, in their own frames of reference\u2014and that Bergson did not understand the theory. Einstein thought the separation of time and space was dead as a concept, that he\u2019d killed it. He was wrong\u2014we still think of time and space as differ\u00adent, even if we grasp relativity. Nonetheless, many took his side, and it did lasting damage to Bergson\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n

Philosophers and physicists still speak of the specious present. \u201cThe true present is a dimensionless speck,\u201d Alan Burdick writes in his book Why Time Flies<\/em>. \u201cThe specious present, in contrast, is \u2018the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible\u2019\u2009\u201d\u2014he quotes James. The specious present, Burdick adds, \u201cis a proxy measure of consciousness.\u201d It is what we think of as now. Not the gen\u00aderal now, as in \u201cthe way we live now,\u201d but right now<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And how long is now? In an eight-\u00adminute YouTube video with over one million views, called \u201cWhat exactly is the present?,\u201d the physicist Derek Muller attempts to explain. According to Muller, engineers working on the problem of syncing video and audio in preparation for the first live television broadcasts found that viewers didn\u2019t ac\u00adtually notice if they were a little out of sync, but there was \u201can asymmetry\u201d\u2014the sound can lag the video by up to 125 milliseconds before people notice something\u2019s wrong, but if the sound leads the video by more than 45 milliseconds, they know it\u2019s off. Of course, sound and \u201cvideo\u201d aren\u2019t synced in the real world either: When we watch someone walk down the street, away from us, dribbling a basketball, the sound takes longer and longer to reach us, but we still perceive the bouncing sounds and the bouncing visuals as simultaneous. That\u2019s because \u201cnow\u201d is not a speck but a span, of about a tenth of a second. During that interval, Muller says, \u201cyour brain can perform manipulations that distort your perception of time and rearrange causality\u201d\u2014syncing up the audio and video, like a live broadcast on a slight delay. It\u2019s as though your brain takes in the infor\u00admation and processes it a little before you do. Researchers have exploited this discovery to fool people into thinking a computer program can read their minds, that it knows what they\u2019re going to do before they actually do it. We\u2019re capable of perceiving an effect before we realize we\u2019ve caused it.<\/p>\n

The neuroscientist David Eagleman has said, \u201cYou\u2019re always living in the past\u201d\u2014meaning not that the past haunts us, though it does, but that what we experience as the present is in fact the past, the very recent past, the just past. In a way, then, time is memory\u2014not clock-\u00adtime, perhaps. Not Einstein\u2019s time. But human time is human memory.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I started writing The Unreality of Memory<\/em> in 2016, in what seemed like a state of emergency. In the months leading up to the elec\u00adtion, I was following reality like it was TV, as though every day ended in a cliffhanger. There was something addictive about Donald Trump\u2019s incredible rise\u2014incredible in the original sense, unable to be believed.<\/p>\n

This profound sense of unreality reached its culmina\u00adtion on the night of the election. Earlier that day, I\u2019d felt light on my feet, optimistic\u2014I risked jinxing it by purchas\u00ading proleptic champagne. I remember the moment, late into the night, when a win for Hillary Clinton had become vanishingly unlikely, though not technically impossible. John and I were watching the returns come in on his lap\u00adtop, and stress\u00ad-drinking, though not champagne\u2014that stayed in the fridge. We watched a newscaster nervously talk through the maps showing Clinton\u2019s last outs. John turned and looked at me in horror and said, \u201cHe\u2019s going to win.\u201d A bottomless moment.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2017, I spoke on a panel called some\u00adthing like \u201cArt in the Age of Trump.\u201d One writer on the panel insisted that the role of the artist is empathy; with an air of limitless patience, he suggested writing a story or a novel from the perspective of Donald Trump\u2014to at\u00adtempt to understand him. I felt a portion of the audience grow increasingly restless and frustrated. One man cried out, \u201cThere\u2019s no time!\u201d I recognized the note in his voice, a note of urgency unto panic.<\/p>\n

That panic, for me, has mostly passed. It has not passed for everyone\u2014not for trans people I know, or for immi\u00adgrants and the families of immigrants. But as scared as I am of the future, I must admit that for now I\u2019m fairly safe, even comfortable. When news of another school shooting hits\u2014the word \u201canother\u201d seems inadequate\u2014or when I read calm, measured reporting of slowly progressing disasters like ice melt in Antarctica (or, or \u2026 I hate these placeholder lists of atrocities), I\u2019m disturbed\u2014logically I\u2019m disturbed. I recognize the facts as disturbing, though what\u2019s no longer shocking or even surprising can verge quite horribly into boring. I still find Trump evil, but I no longer find him interesting<\/em>. And I still have to work (how can it be so, that I have to waste my life this way, when the world is ending?), eat, sleep, and start over again. I move through the days in a flux of anxiety and denial. But that fear in the background changes things. It changes how I make decisions. I can\u2019t say how long this relative safety will last. It feels like a suspended emergency\u2014like the specious present has been extended in both directions. Now<\/em> feels longer.<\/p>\n

Is the world ending? Which end is the end? For a while I told people, facetiously I suppose, that I was writing a book about the end of the world. Once at a family lunch, my aunt asked me what I was writing about, and I said I was writing about disasters. \u201cWhat about disasters?\u201d she asked, and I wasn\u2019t sure how to answer. My mother stepped in with a much better elevator pitch: \u201cIsn\u2019t it more about how we think about disasters?\u201d My own thinking, at least with regard to the<\/em> disaster\u2014the<\/em> end\u2014has shifted. To be clear, I do worry that civilization is doomed. (The word \u201cworry\u201d seems inadequate; I almost wrote \u201cbelieve.\u201d) But I\u2019m not sure the doom will occur like a moment, like an event, like a disaster. Like the impact of a bomb or an asteroid. I wonder if the way the world gets worse will barely outpace the rate at which we get used to it.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have faith that my sense of history, from here inside history, is accurate, or that the view through the rickety apparatus of my body is clear. Eagleman notes that \u201cmost of what you see, your conscious perception, is computed on a need-\u00adto\u00ad-know basis.\u201d We ignore what our brains\u2014independently!\u2014deem unnecessary. There is no other self, to tell yourself what to do. The German bi\u00adologist Jakob von Uexku\u0308ll had a term for what animals pick up on in their surroundings: the Umwelt<\/em>. The Umwelt<\/em> is always limited by the organism\u2019s equipment, by its imme\u00addiate needs. Eagleman, explaining Uexku\u0308ll\u2019s ideas, writes: \u201cIn the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knife fish, it\u2019s electrical fields. For the echo\u00ad-locating bat, it\u2019s air-\u00adcompression waves. The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its Umwelt<\/em>. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the Umgebung<\/em>.\u201d The Umgebung<\/em> is the unknown unknown, the unperceived unperceived.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the matter of perspective, and there\u2019s also the matter of scale. A young poet I know noticed that I often write about the self watching the self. He quoted an es\u00adsay in which I wrote that I fantasize in the third person, connecting this to another piece, which mentions Robert Smithson\u2019s earthwork sculpture Spiral Jetty<\/em>. \u201cDo you think land artists moreso desired their work to be experienced within (standing on the rocks, beside the hole) or from above (via camera, airplane)?\u201d he asked me in an email. My mind spiraled off. It\u2019s very hard for me, I told him, to be \u201cpresent in the moment\u201d\u2014I\u2019m always going meta, narrativ\u00adizing, thinking about what I\u2019m thinking about, imagining the future\u2014and then in my specious present, I\u2019m com\u00adparing what is happening to what I had imagined would happen, my souvenir du pre\u0301sent<\/em> to my memoire de l\u2019avenir<\/em>. I didn\u2019t say that Smithson didn\u2019t mean for Spiral Jetty<\/em> to be seen at all, or at least not for long\u2014he built it when the water levels in Great Salt Lake were unusually low: a comment on ephemerality at epic scales. Finished in 1970, the jetty had disappeared by the time he died, in 1973, in a plane crash while surveying sites for a new piece. It stayed hidden for thirty years. Since 2002, drought has kept the water levels low, so it is now usually visible. The ephem\u00aderality doubles back: The design exposed, it\u2019s Smithson\u2019s intention, human intention, that\u2019s ephemeral.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve grown tired of reading about disasters. Friends send me links, and I click them and skim halfheartedly. One article, published just after the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was partially destroyed in a fire, references the so\u00adciologist Charles Perrow\u2019s 1984 book, Normal Accidents<\/em>, which notes that safety systems increase the complexity of technology, inevitably leading to unforeseen errors, which can be catastrophic. The Chernobyl meltdown was trig\u00adgered by a safety test. (In 2019, HBO made a series about Chernobyl, but I didn\u2019t watch it; I\u2019m tired of disaster mov\u00adies.) Another questions the slippery use of \u201cwe\u201d in writing about climate change, as in \u201cWe are emitting more carbon dioxide than ever.\u201d \u201cThe we<\/em> responsible for climate change is a fictional construct, one that\u2019s distorting and danger\u00adous,\u201d writes Genevieve Guenther, a writer who founded a volunteer organization called EndClimateSilence.org. \u201cBy hiding who\u2019s really responsible for our current, terrifying predicament, we<\/em> provides political cover for the people who are happy to let hundreds of millions of other people die for their own profit and pleasure.\u201d It provides cover, in other words, for the giant corporations, like ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, that are responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions. In 2017, the Carbon Majors Report revealed that a hundred companies account for more than 70 percent of those emissions. \u201cAlways remember that there are mil\u00adlions, possibly billions, of people on this planet who would rather preserve civilization than destroy it with climate change,\u201d Guenther writes. \u201cMost people are good.\u201d<\/p>\n

That sentence gives me pause. \u201cMost People Are Good\u201d is also the name of a country song I hate: I believe this world ain\u2019t half as bad as it looks<\/em>, the guy croons in the chorus. The more I think of it, the more I disagree. I don\u2019t think most people are good, or bad, for that matter. I think people are neutral. From a distance, they look almost interchangeable. It seems to me that \u201cgood people\u201d can become \u201cbad people\u201d when provided the opportunity within an existing power structure\u2014to claim and exert power at a deadly cost to others and get away with it. It is not an act of empathy for me to say that Trump is not inherently evil, but \u201cwe\u201d have created opportunities for him to be evil. To say that most people are powerless\u2014that evil is a role. In some novel I once read, one character reminded another that a \u201crevolution\u201d is simply a turn of the wheel; it doesn\u2019t break the power structure, it just changes who is on top. I think about that all the time. I think about these lines from an Ilya Kaminsky poem: \u201cAt the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?\u2009\/\u2009And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?\u201d We, you and I, are not corporations, but we do give those corporations godlike power. \u201cThey\u201d is a dangerous construct, too. There\u2019s no one to dismantle them but us.<\/p>\n

I recently read my friend Chip Cheek\u2019s novel about a honeymoon gone wrong. It starts off feeling escapist\u2014the publisher clearly marketed it as a beach read\u2014but it turns into a kind of apocalypse novel. It\u2019s about what ruin really looks like; there are consequences for the couple\u2019s immoral (and stupid) behavior, but in the end we\u2019re de\u00adnied the pleasure of an all-\u00adout catastrophe, the realization of what Sontag called our \u201cfantasies of doom,\u201d our \u201ctaste for worst-case scenarios.\u201d The novel is set in the fifties, but even period fiction written now is climate fiction, I real\u00adized; it\u2019s always on some level aware of what we\u2019ve reaped. The storms have levels of foreboding.<\/p>\n

My research into past disasters\u2014the plagues and the almost nuclear wars\u2014was often oddly comforting. We\u2019re still here, after all. But I can only take so much comfort in the past. This point in history does feel different, like we\u2019re nearing an event horizon. How many times can his\u00adtory repeat itself? It\u2019s generally accepted that our memories are fallible\u2014that they\u2019re missing information, that they include new details we\u2019ve simply made up\u2014and that over time they are less and less reliable, as we keep rewriting the inaccuracies. We\u2019re more trusting, though, of what we take to be our direct experience, our experience of the present. I\u2019m drawn to Uexku\u0308ll\u2019s idea of the Umwelt<\/em>; like a tick or a bat, we only know what we know. I\u2019m drawn to Bergson\u2019s idea that perception and memory are coterminous. It sug\u00adgests that we don\u2019t experience reality as it is, and then warp it in recall, but that even the first time we live through X<\/em>, we are already experiencing our warped version of X<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently <\/em>The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays and <\/em>The Word Pretty.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays<\/a>,<\/em> by Elisa Gabbert. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright \u00a9 2020 by Elisa Gabbert. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Henri Bergson, disasters, and the human perception of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Unreality of Time by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On Henri Bergson, disasters, and the human perception of time.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/08\/11\/the-unreality-of-time\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Unreality of Time by Elisa 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