How to Love the Universe by Stefan Klein

Author:Stefan Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The Experiment

8

HOW TIME PASSES

A greying beard makes you wonder why the

past can never come back. We experience

the passing of time because we are not omniscient.

The universe is growing older, as well.

Not long ago I got a shock at the bathroom sink one morning. I had returned from a long walking holiday high in the Alps, during which I hadn’t bothered to shave. I was just squeezing the shaving cream onto the brush when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and thought I’d already lathered my face. In the mirror my cheeks and chin were gleaming bright, as if covered in shaving foam. Was it a hallucination? Or was my memory going already? I touched my face—it was dry, so no reason to worry about my mind. What I’d thought was shaving foam on my black hair was just a white beard.

Time passes. Nothing seems as self-evident to us as the fact that at every moment the future is turning into the past. We cannot imagine a world without time. And yet it is strange that we are so sure about it. After all, we don’t feel time itself at all; we only notice that the state of something is different from the way we remember it. So could time simply be another word for change? That was what was going through my mind as I swirled the brush in the shaving cream. But in that case the philosophers who have been thinking about the nature of time for thousands of years would have been on the wrong track. My answer to the question about the nature of time was very simple: a beard turning grey.

But where does the change come from? Why is yesterday different from today? Why do we have to grow older? The answer is by no means obvious, for many things can be undone. Stubble can be shaved off, an impulse purchase can be returned, as a rule anyone who goes on a trip comes back home. We do, however, establish that time is passing from permanent changes. Thus we only experience the difference between past and future because there are events that cannot be reversed. A shriveled apple will never be fresh again. A thoughtless remark can’t be taken back. And the experience of life stored in one’s memory makes it impossible to be seventeen again.

Some things are irrevocable. That’s why we experience the present as a special moment. I’ll never be able to watch my daughter making her first attempts at riding a bicycle again. The sight of her wobbling and swerving around the empty parking lot and her cries of jubilation are just memory now. They exist only inside my head but don’t seem real to me anymore. The past appears to be lost forever. We may well know that there was a world at the time of the Emperor Augustus, but that world feels no more true to us than a fantasy novel. Why? Because we’re not present in that world. We only see the world as real in a single moment: the “now.

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