such as: "Time is something objective, it is self-evident. My watch measures it, therefore it exists! And w h y do away with it? What's wrong with it? Can one go against the grain?"
Linear Time
Without wanting to face these questions head-on from the very outset, let us first try to dissect our habitual concept of time deemed as self-evident and sufficing unto itself. This concept of time is linear because it is perceived as a straight, almost infinite line, upon which we stand or rather along which everything moves: "The date is May the 15th, 19.., the time is 11:33 A.M., G. M. T." We can live with this but scientists would like to be more specific: May the 15th, 15.223.967.492 A.B.B. -anno Big Bang - and entropy will bring the universe to a grinding halt in the year 48.793.538.193"!
Along this infinite straight line, the present, a mere infinitesimal point, steers a oneway course, always headed in the same direction -there is no turning back! - at a constant speed, oblivious to the events around it. Our common sense takes this so much for granted that it does not even dawn upon us that archaic mankind may have had another perception of time.
The dictate of our stopwatches makes us forget that this linear time is:
a) an abstraction, b) a recent one,
c) and insidiously pernicious.
Newton who, like Adam, had a thing about apples, still had a cyclical view of time, like natural man and woman, but for us time elapses in a uniform way, like the sand in an hourglass: the upper part contains the future, whereas the past is building up in the lower one, and the sand slipping through the neck between the two vessels represents our evanescent present. The hourglass represents life: at birth, the upper vessel is full and then it empties inexorably until the bitter end.
How much sand is left in my hourglass?
Time became linear in the 17th century, on the night of November 10th, 1619, when young Rene Descartes conceived of the universe as an immense machine where everything could be explained and fitted in perfectly. In other words, cosmic clockwork! He even went so far as to apply this mechanistic idea to humans as he wrote in his Treatise of Man: "All of these functions unfold naturally in this machine (the body) by virtue of the arrangement of its organs, just like clockwork."
And in the 17th century as well, the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huyghens invented the pendulum clock, an accurate and unending mechanism, relying u p o n gears, and this device materialized the Cartesian concept of a machine-universe and provided an "objective measurement" of the elapsing time. Clocks and watches, so inexpen-sive today that everybody can afford one (whereas a century ago they were still rare objects worn only by wealthy city dwellers) created the illusion of linear time.
Another familiar object was involved in "linearizing" time: the cal-endar. On the one hand it serializes and materializes the past - "that event happened on March 15th last..." - on the other it is an anticipa-tion of the future which thus acquires a sort of preemptive existence.
Cast in the concrete of our datebooks, Christmas seems so "real" that the spirit is with us already!
But the snag is that these time-measuring devices, be they an hour-glass or a watch, eat away at our lives: what do we die of, what kills us if not time! "We count the remaining minutes of our lives and shake our hourglass to speed things u p " wrote de Vigny, echoing the Bavarian Doctor and his cynical sign "It is later than you think." The implacable stopwatch materializes time which, like a rat, gnaws away, unrelenting, at my life.
The "logical" reaction is to go the whole hog. If time is limited, then let's fill it to the brim. And so one must produce more, enjoy things more, possess everything, right away, go faster and faster. Watches and calendars become considerable stress factors - this job must be fin-ished before - in order to live more fully, we live faster, we run faster, drive faster, fly faster and faster. We suffer from an acute record-breaking compulsion. The result being that we also die faster: this
Profane Time, Sacred Time 27
rushing around puts our biological rhythms under tremendous pres-sure, thereby disrupting and disconnecting them from those of the universe.
In giving us the impression that life is slipping through our fingers, linear time makes us "time-sick" according to Doctors Friedman and Roseman. People constantly rushing about suffer from this time-sick-ness syndrome: they p r o d u c e too m u c h adrenaline, insulin, and hydrocortisone, their stomach secretes too much acid, they breathe too fast, have muscular spasms and their cholesterol increases. People always in a mad rush, under constant time constraints, die at an earli-er age, from coronary disease, for example.
The corollary of linear time can be found in the myth of irresistible, continuous, linear progress. Of course, a computer can be seen as
"progress" when compared to a mechanical calculator. And all right, new products are "better," than older ones: today's wash is whiter than yesterday's, but just wait until you see tomorrow's. This year's cars are a "step forward" vis-a-vis last year's models, etc. Science is constantly making great strides forward. The newer, the better, is the general feeling. Everything is changing, everything is developing, con-sequently things are getting better and better, progress is underway.
This idea of progress as an absolute value is just as pernicious and abstract as linear time. And it constitutes yet another stress factor.
We consider unchanging life-styles - like in an Indian village, for example - as backward. And yet, this resistance to change - a fate worse than death for most of us! - erases linear time and almost erases time altogether. An old man strolling through his village is in touch with his own childhood. The well has not changed since he was a boy and it's the same well where his father or his grandfather drew water.
Women wear the same saris, they carry the same copper jugs on their heads, children still play the same games. The huts have not changed nor have the fields.
Today resembles yesterday and so will tomorrow. (However India has already been contaminated by our time-keeping watches and clocks and our illusion of linear progress.) But when we Westerners return to our hometown, the church is probably still standing but everything else has changed, things have been disrupted, developed, "modernized."
Only nostalgia remains. The only telltale signs of our youth are to be found in some familiar object forgotten in a drawer, in a dusty old photo album. (I'd like to point out in passing that I am not an anti-progress diehard, I just strive to realize the relativity of such a concept.) Does "progress" exist in nature and in life? Is it because each year new, p u r p o r t e d l y u n b r e a k a b l e sports records are shattered that humanity is physically improving?
Life is changing, life is evolving, but is that tantamount to constant progress? Is evolution a linear phenomenon? Has an oak today made any progress compared to an oak a million years ago? Have today's species "come a long way" compared to those in geological ages? All they have done is adapt to a changing environment. Does a rabbit rep-resent progress vis-a-vis a dinosaur, or an ant vis-a-vis an elephant?
Modern humans are not necessarily, nor in all respects, superior to archaic peoples. Compared to pygmies, doomed to disappear along with the overexploited rain forest, contemporary urban man and woman are no positive case for progress, either in terms of strength or health, or from the point of view of their joie de vivre, in spite of the former's so-called primitive life-style. In any case, the idea of the "20th century" does not exist for a pygmy, nor does it exist for the rest of nature - but it's catching up fast - and with a vengeance!