Is it just me or is the concept of time pretty weird? The conceptual division of all existence into past, present, and future carries with it some odd baggage, doesn’t it? For instance, I say or write something in the present, but the millisecond it is said or written, it falls into the past. In fact, what we consider the present is really an infinitesimally small fraction of activities physically taking place anywhere in the world. These events are surrounded on one temporal side by the past disappearing off into pre-recorded history, and on the other by a future that extends infinitely off into the unknown.
I’ll start with what we consider the present. You’ve all heard the adage that one should live in the present, in the “here and now.” But this is impossible to achieve, in a literal sense, isn’t it? The present is by its very nature fleeting, ephemeral. One second you’re doing something, the next second it’s done . . . and in the past. Of course we all know that what’s meant by that expression is we shouldn’t spend so much time regretting our past or worrying about our future that we can’t enjoy what’s happening around us at any given time. Still, living in the present can be exhausting, the never-ending perception of the transition of every type of activity from future to past in a virtually indecipherable whirlwind. You’re forced to keep an eye looking forward or behind just to make any sense of it at all.
What’s more, the present sense of time bends, doesn’t it, depending on the activity undertaken. Another old expression “a watched pot never boils” speaks to this concept, however untrue it may be. Of course the pot boils, if enough heat is added for long enough, and on one very boring, very rainy day I proved this fact. For the record, it felt like I started watching in fifth grade and saw the bubbles somewhere around Freshman year in college. But that’s kinda my point, on some occasions time seems to drag on sooooooooooo slooooooowllllly. Inform a five year-old that Christmas is still a week away and you might as well be telling them to wait for their first social security check! And yet, how quickly does a week pass for you or me? Feels like the blink of an eye these days.
As well, when things get very intense, especially when events become life-threatening, time seems to slow to a crawl. It’s as if our brains are suddenly shifted into overdrive and the sheer volume of thoughts that flash before our inner eye makes everything else seem slower by comparison. Like Hammy the Squirrel in his “Over the Hedge” sugar-induced euphoria we feel as if everything around us is moving in slow motion. I’ve experienced this a few times myself, most recently during a particularly nasty bike accident that seemed to take about an hour and a half from perception of the oncoming car to pulling myself up by the bumper. Unlike Hammy, unfortunately, our own actions and reactions take place at the same slow speed of the world dragging by around us, but our thoughts . . . wow . . . what a barrage of images, remembered feelings and sensations!
The opposite is true as well, right? The best times of our life seem like they pass us by in hyperspeed. Hence yet another old expression “time flies when you’re having fun.” It’s true, and we’ve all experienced it. Contrast six hours with close friends that you haven’t seen for a while with just one hour at a boring lecture you didn’t want to attend in the first place. Which one felt like it lasted longer? On the one hand you look at your watch for the first time all evening and discover to your shock it’s already midnight. On the other, thirty-five minutes into it you have to scrape away the cobwebs to even see your watch!
So, the present can be weird, lasting mere moments, we perceive it as if through a window on a bus moving through the countryside. The picture is constantly changing though at a pace largely unrelated to the actual scenery beyond or the viewer sitting in the seat.
The future is, well, magical to us. In our imagination it’s a “place” where virtually anything is possible. We really like the future, don’t we, as it can be very comforting to project our present selves forward to a time when we’ve somehow managed to solve all our current problems and life is just . . . good. Take it a step further and one can easily imagine a world without war, free from disease—and the over-crowding, lack of food and water that result—as humanity finds it’s equilibrium with the earth and the excesses and depredations of the past seem, in retrospect, utter folly.
As a realist, I can’t help but take the contrarian view of all the technological innovations we imagine the future will bring and somehow turn our world into a space-age, Jetsons-like paradise. While I can appreciate the innovation involved, I can’t help but point out the potential down-side of things. For example, we’re told flying cars will alleviate traffic problems. Really? Have you seen how poorly some idiots drive on the ground? And you want them to have access to the air?!? I just can’t see this ending well. Oh, but the robots will be doing the driving and it will be safer for everyone . . . did you watch Terminator? Or Terminator 2?? Or Terminator 3?!? Sure, what could go wrong with cars that think for themselves?
But there’s the future for you, full of both promise and threat, you can read into it just about anything you want. Will it be better? Probably. Will it be worse? Also likely. Will humankind somehow find a way to quench its thirst for riches, resources, and security in such a way that war and armed conflict will disappear? I find that terribly improbable as we are who we are and not likely to change quite so much. But there you have it, let’s move on to my favorite subdivision of time.
Most anybody following this blog knows by now that I love the past, particularly the militant past otherwise known as the history of human conflict and warfare. A large part of what intrigues me about this field of study is the extreme nature of it all, this violent extension of politics. Add to it that every person on the planet who ever lived experienced conflict differently, depending largely upon their culture and the era in which they lived, and I find myself drawn to the stories, enchanted by the narrative. I deeply desire, through research, reading, travel, and reflection, to understand historic conflicts through the eyes of those who actually experienced them.
But the past can seem odd as well, right? Almost no matter what I do in the present, once it becomes past there will be people who are supportive and those who oppose the action. Almost anything! I’ve no doubt there is a group somewhere out there right now lobbying hard to keep rodeo clowns from riding blue bicycles with training wheels on the second Sunday of each month of a year ending in an even number. People are just weird that way, and getting weirder, it seems. More to the point, historical facts can be easily distorted by this advocacy or opposition in the same way, as historical figures carefully preserved the accounts they liked, altering or even erasing altogether those they didn’t. Ultimately this leaves modern historians less and less to go on sometimes in their quest to better understand the events of the distant past. Surviving materials are scarce, and so historians have a hard time putting those pieces together into a coherent picture. But the question remains whether it will it be easier or harder for future historians digging through our records, an era when literally every human on the planet can leave a trace of some type. Regardless, what we understand of the past today has generally been squeezed through many filters before it got to us and it’s important to understand that whenever we read historical accounts.
In part this is what’s led me to reading and then writing historical fiction. With pure history you’re stuck with a filtered version of the past that survived the ages. While today any idiot can blast a blog entry to the entire world (I’m living proof of that!) in times past, the means to capture a narrative and ensure it lived on into the future was generally limited to the wealthy and powerful. This is why so much of what is left to us from history was written by those with the means—and desire—to preserve their accomplishments. But historical fiction as a genre seeks to find gaps in established, accepted history and fill them with a plausible storyline. The author is no longer bound to the point of view of only the rich and powerful but is free to explore the experiences of the other 99% of a given population. Good historical fiction, then, attempts to address the lives of average people, providing the reader a full-bodied historical canvas to take in and help them experience another time, culture, and way of life very different from their own. The fact that such a story can be laid out upon a backdrop of accepted historical events just makes it all the more compelling.
So for me, the past is a vast playground, growing with each passing day. I love to read the old accounts, balance them with what archaeologists have unearthed, and mix in my own observations of humankind to form what I believe to be a fuller picture of the past. I live to visit historic sites, walking in the footsteps of great men and women from a previous age, seeing what they saw from the places they saw it as they made decisions that have come down to us through the ages.
Ultimately, I guess, it’s not surprising that, writing this on my forty-sixth birthday, the topic of time should arise. I’m marking the passage of another year of life so it’s only natural, I think, to spend a little bit of my time thinking about what it all means. Still, I find it amazing just how quickly it has all passed, and in a rare fit of nostalgia will probably waste a few moments today leafing through old photo albums . . . you remember . . . those things from the past we old folk employed to view and preserve pictures. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about . . . imagine a cardboard iPhone minus the call function, text function, email app, access to the internet, GPS, world clock, calculator, and electricity.
Time passes quickly and much changes in the span of a single human life. While we’re fascinated by the events of the past and anxious to see what the future brings, we should still strive to make the best present we can. Help the elderly lady across the street. Extend a kindness to a random person in your building. Give some attention to a stray animal. Lend an ear to somehow having a difficult time, and a shoulder if necessary. One can never predict the harvest these simple acts of kindness might yield in the future . . . or what will be written into your past when you’ve gone.
M. G. Haynes