Twenty Ways of Thinking About Time

1. Japan lies 13 hours ahead of Vermont, so your morning is my tomorrow. When I call you, the date I could give for our conversation; would be in your past, the date you give in my future.

2. When I last flew home from Tokyo, I arrived in New York before I left.

3. The theory of relativity teaches us that time and space are both just aspects of the same thing, through which we all move at the speed of light. When I sit in a parked car, all my progress is through time. When I press the gas, some of that movement turns into travel through space; the faster I go, the slower my time. For a photon of light, no time passes at all.

4. How many flights will you take now without me? How many flights does it take before even the chronologies of our lives noticeably divide?

5. In China, all time is Beijing time. This means that those who live on the western rim of the country, 4,000 miles away, must wake in darkness and go to sleep at sunset. Wearing a watch set to Uyghur time—marking noon as when the sun lies directly overhead—is a treasonous act. People have been jailed for this.

6. Dogs can tell time. When the bus dropped you and your sister off at 3 p.m., the dog, hearing its engine, would run to greet you. When the bus came a few hours early, he bristled until he saw who it was, then burst into surprised and gratified wiggles.

7. Cats can tell time, but not well. For our cat, it was dinnertime all afternoon.

8. If a fly tells time, it won’t match my watch. They see faster than we do, which is why they are so hard to swat. Our swiftest gestures look to them like slow motion. A turtle might not seem to move at all. To the turtle, everything we do is as jittery and hyperactive as a fly.

9. There’s nothing in the math of physical interactions that presupposes that time moves forward. Theoretically, eggs could unbreak, scattered cards could stack themselves into a deck, and goodbyes could dissolve into present tenses.

10.  What prevents this, physicists think, is entropy, the principle that everything in the world steadily moves toward disorder.

11.  W. B. Yeats knew this. “Things fall apart,” he wrote a hundred years ago, at the end of a world war and the beginning of a local one. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

12.  Alzheimer’s stole your great-aunt’s memory with chronological precision. At first, she could not remember what she had done with her handbag. Slowly she lost the years she had worked as a scientist in Baltimore. Before she stopped talking at all, she sang nursery rhymes and wrote her address—a dairy farm in North Carolina—with a child’s hand.

13.  You once made a video in which our lives flowed in reverse: kicked shoes flew back onto feet, splashes sucked back into calm water, snowflakes drifted lazily into the sky.

14.  Do your memories tick off our past with the metronomic monotony of Newton’s equations, or do they shimmer like reversed snowflakes, like quarks, all uncertainty and strangeness?

15.  When I was 19, I lay on the floor in a friend of a friend’s spare bedroom, in a city I did not know, and imagined myself far in the future remembering that moment. If I try, I can overlay the green and gold morning I’m sitting in now with the nap of that carpet, hear the loon calling through the cheap radio tuned to a public broadcast station.

16.  I had never heard a loon call in real life. Now I have heard many. They still sound as they did then, of an almost unreachable wildness. Lilacs still smell bittersweet. All through the Northeast, apple trees flower next to the cellar holes of buildings the forest has swallowed.

17.  It is no longer that green and gold morning, but I keep the present tense.

18.  We talk of time moving forward or back, but some physicists say that time does not move at all. Each moment is eternal, locked in place like a block of Lucite, and only our consciousness sweeps across it like a pendulum.

19.  That means it will always be that green and gold morning.

20.  That means you are still with me.