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May/Jun 2012
Tallis in Wonderland

A Hasty Report From A Tearing Hurry

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Raymond Tallis has a measured response to numbered seconds.
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“And strangers were as brothers to his clocks”
W.H. Auden
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Readers of this column will know that I am committed to snatching time from the
jaws of physics; in particular to rescuing it from a reduction to a quasi-spatial Share
dimension and its further reduction to numbers. Thus reduced, time becomes a mere
Enlarge cove r variable – t – that has no qualities, only numerical values, and none of the features
that make it central to human life. For example, little t, unlike time as we experience
Back Issues it, has no tenses. The difference between (say) a regretted past and an anticipated
future is lost in t.
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I could go on about the poverty of t, but I won’t, because I am also aware that in demoting t I might
Podcasts overlook something rather extraordinary: the mysterious verb ‘to time’. While all beings (pebbles, trees,
monkeys etc) are in some sense ‘in’ time – immersed or perhaps dissolved in it – we humans are alone in
Search timing what happens – including (or especially) timing what happens to our very lives. We portion time into
days, and number days, and parts of days, and know that our days are numbered. One striking illustration
Forum of this is that of all the occupants of the Solar System – rocks, trees, lemurs, etc – we alone use the
relative movements of the Solar System’s components to organise our own commitments. What a delicious
Events piece of cheek to appropriate the rotation of the Earth round the Sun to instruct us when to do what – for
example, when to have our Christmas dinner. To vary a saying of Douglas Adams: “Time is mysterious; tea-
Links time doubly so.”

Books So we should not allow objections to the reduction of time to little t to allow us to overlook the mysterious

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 activity of ‘timing’, or the extraordinary truth that despite the gap between lived and measured time,
Free Articles measuring it has enabled us (via science and technology) to extend, protect, enrich and enhance our
existence – indeed, to have the time of our lives. “Measurement began our might” as the poet William Yeats
said: it extended our powers beyond anything that could be imagined by our pre-numerate ancestors.
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Deep Time Thoughts

Timing has not only enabled us to see more of how the material world works so that we can work on it, or
Most Most Most
with it, more effectively; it has also greatly extended our temporal gaze. In recent centuries, we have
R e ad Discusse d Em aile d
come to situate ourselves in ‘deep time’: the time revealed by archaeologists, evolutionary biologists,
geologists and astrophysicists. Thus we locate ourselves in a span of time that exceeds the duration of our
1. A Hasty Report From
lives by billions of years, and the duration of the species to which we belong by not much less. The
A Tearing Hurry
measurement that has made us collectively mighty has created a mirror in which we see ourselves as
2. The Death of individually, existentially small – a tendency I criticised in my previous column (‘You Chemical Scum, You’).
Postmodernism And
Yet the sense, implicit in the verb ‘to time’, of accessing time directly, is confusing, and leads to the deeply
Beyond
questionable notion that clocks measure ‘the passage of time’ – something to which we shall return on
3. Addicts, Mythmakers another occasion. Instead, let us glance now at another aspect of timing – also easily overlooked – which
and Philosophers becomes more apparent as timepieces become more sophisticated. It is that we note ‘the time’ at a time.
So I note that it is 4:30 at 4:30: “I looked at the clock at 4:30 and saw that it was 4:30.” This underlines
4. Morality is a the extent to which, as timers, we both stand outside of time and are immersed in it. To know that it is
Culturally Conditioned 4:30 is to be at 4:30, and also to be looking on 4:30 as if from a temporal outside. So in subjecting time to
Response timing, we seem to have succeeded in stepping to one side of time in some respect, while of course,
remaining in it.
5. Plato on a Plate
So, while we are pulling time out of the jaws of physics, we must not forget what an amazing, and deeply
puzzling, activity ‘timing’ is. And its consequences are immeasurable. It transforms social life into a multi
tude of intermeshing ensembles harmonised by timepieces. We watch time and time watches us; and the
portability of the watch compared with, say, the obelisk, locks together the watching and the watched
more intimately. Inside these ever more tightly drawn temporal meshes, the clock rules our every moment.
The living rhythms spelt out in our breathing, our walking and our beating hearts, are overridden by
something totally different, symbolised by the way the watch we consult with fast-beating heart clasps our
wrist, seeming to strangle our pulse. We dance to a rhythm of the shared day, of the common world, of the
universe, that’s imposed and embraced: it is ours and not ours.

This is not all bad, of course. Our lives are vastly enriched by keeping track of the time, and we are
collectively and individually empowered by co-ordination: dancing to the music of clock time, we can work
together more effectively to meet and anticipate our basic needs, to generate ever more complex ways of
exploiting nature, and to erect defences against a universe that has no particular care for us. And we must
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 not underestimate what an extraordinary achievement this is. To take a salient example: the operating
theatre. There is the surface orchestration of the lives of all the experts (surgeons, nurses, technicians,
anaesthetists, cleaners, and engineers) necessary to make the procedure happen safely. But beneath the
task of getting them all to the operating theatre at the right time, there is an almost bottomless
infrastructure of temporally co-ordinated life.

Think of the engineer responsible for making sure the complex machinery in the theatre works, at the right
time. He has to arrive on time, and his journey will have involved a multitude of conductors of his private
orchestra of activities – ranging from the alarm clock he set to wake him up, to the traffic lights whose
efficient, centrally-regulated working made sure that he was not held up forever in jammed traffic. His
assumption of his present post as hospital engineer will also be the end stage of a long journey that has
depended on meeting with others at pre-set times. His skills, for example, will have involved a multitude of
people whose tabled time, set out in a curriculum, will have meshed with his, so that he was able to benefit
from their expertise. The equipment on which he learned his skills, either directly or as illustrations of
principles, had to be manufactured, tested, delivered, maintained and demonstrated by an endless army of
individuals turning up on time and timing their activities to fit in with the activities of others (including the
activity of timing the performance of the machinery). The equipment will itself have a multitude of
components based on clocks, visible and hidden, created by other clock-watchers on physical principles
whose discovery and application and commercialisation involved yet more armies of clock-drilled people. At
every point in his life, our theatre engineer will have been borne up by myriads of clock-conducted fellows.

Time for Tyranny

This is a beneficent example. There are other less heart-warming instances of the consequences of
temporal orchestration. The gigantic torture chamber that is North Korea is an extreme instance of how the
imposed brotherhood of clocks can subordinate individual life entirely to a collective existence where each
is reduced to an atom in a pattern of power servicing the needs of a small elite. And the scale of the
catastrophic wars of recent centuries would not have been possible without clocks to bring men and
materiel together on a giant scale, permitting destruction to be both precise and ubiquitous. The
synchronies which enhance our ability to realise our collective power and knowledge – and which enhance
that collective power with our ever-increasing collective knowledge, unifying greater numbers of us with
ever closer and denser connections – make it possible to hurt each other with appallingly enhanced
efficiency. As time gets further from subjective experience, goes further from our beating hearts,
heartlessness may install itself in the heart of our world.

There are also lesser woes that may follow from keeping time. The kitchen clock, my watch, the pips from
the radio peeping the hour, preside over my hurry, your hurry, the hurry of widening rings of friends and
strangers who soften and domesticate the infinite hard clockwork of the universe. Thus our orchestrated
lives may be being emptied even as they are being enriched. The ever-greater efficiency of an ever-more-
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 intimately-clocked world adds to our opportunities, but it also drives a positive feedback cycle in which we
demand more of the world and the world demands more of us. This quickening of pace is evident in every
aspect of our lives. We supplement the treadmill of work with a treadmill of pleasure – hurry seems to be a
constant condition, even if the hurry is to catch a plane to go on holiday, to arrive at a concert on time, or
to honour an engagement whose sole purpose is for a casual get-together. We are forever on the edge of
being late, and any dereliction in this respect causes us anguish: we are mortified, and the others are
impatient.

So as we seem to get a grip on time via numbers, time gets an ever-tighter grip on us. We are like Gulliver
in Lilliput, pinned to the ground by a multitude of chronological threads, notwithstanding that our hastes
become more manic and our passage from one thing to the next is an increasingly fluid slide.

Future Continuous
The tyranny of the clock extends to our future. The calendar on the wall prescribes what is going to (or
ought to) happen. Our days are mortgaged weeks, months and years ahead. A phone call on the morning of
November 12th 2010 commits the afternoon of July 14th 2012. The future we may not even live to see is
populated with constraining possibilities, with shared intentions that are mutual obligations.

The newer forms of communication not only permit an instantaneity of response, they seem to demand it.
Others expect immediate or continuous availability, and we expect this of others. We are electronically
skewered by emails, texts, cellphone calls. Our lives are co-ordinated, shaped, even filled, by the heavens
– not by the stars, but by orbiting satellites. As we ‘communicate’ more electronically, we seem to
communicate less. This paradox symptomatizes what is happening more generally: that, as we travel faster
and our journeys are increasingly effortless, so we seem to travel lighter, indeed to become lighter. We are
attenuated – or, as I have described it, ‘e-ttenuated’. The inability fully to experience our experiences,
except when those experiences are unpleasant (hunger, cold, pain, terror, grief) becomes ever more
evident. We have to look to boredom to restore to time its weight, so that time hangs heavily.

So while we are rescuing time from the jaws of physics, we might spare a little time to think how we might
rescue ourselves from the machinery of clocks – while still, of course, honouring our responsibilities in an
increasingly closely clocked human world, and being duly respectful of what we ‘timers’ have achieved.
Thinking about the mystery of time; of timing; and yes, of the body of knowledge that is physics, all
seemingly transilluminating the material world, may be a place to start. But I can’t start now because – My
God, is that the time!!!! – I’ve got to email this article to the editor.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2012

Raymond Tallis is a physician, philosopher, poet, broadcaster and novelist. His latest book In Defence of

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 Wonder is just out from Acumen.

ABO UT C O NTAC T FO R AUTHO R S TER MS & C O NDITIO NS

© Philosophy Now 2012. All rights re se rve d.

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