What is time?

I don’t think we actually know. That’s not to say that we haven’t tried to define it, containing it within the parameters of what we (think) we know. I could answer with the numbers consigned to the movement of the sun and the gradient of its light that the hands of my clock now point to: 20:23. Or the number of planetary resolutions around the Sun since the death of Christ: 2018. I could answer with a cultural polemic describing the shape of contemporary society and its difference from earlier societies. Or I could quote Shakespeare and suggest that “we are time’s subject, and time bids be gone”. I could answer that time flies; that it is lost, irretrievable, wasted. That it is short and that it is endless. That is, we can describe time and we use time itself to describe all manner of things. We cannot, however, define it. And I think that’s because we don’t, really, understand it. None of those answers are wrong, but not one of them looks you in the eye and, unflinchingly, absolves that this is all and everything that time is. 

Time at Murray Edwards College. In the changing colour of the leaves; in the fact that I am stood here where so many previous female scholars stood and future female scholars will stand, and narrate it from this particular point within the lineage of continuity; in the movement from a lecture to a supervision, their schedule interrupted by the taking of this picture.

Noun: the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. 

Verb: to plan, schedule or arrange when (something) should happen or be done.  

Does time even exist? As a noun or a verb, time confounds simple ontological description. Whilst the progression of existence and events and the act of scheduling both suggest an ontology (‘progression’ or a ‘schedule’), neither are really so tangible nor definite as to refute the question of time’s existence in a satisfactory, end-of-argument way. Yet time, or whatever it is that we have so called ‘time’, irrefutably exists. It’s in the wrinkles that gradually write themselves across foreheads and the grey that slowly tinges the colour from hair. It’s in the consciousness that delineates a present from a yesterday and a tomorrow. It’s in the knowledge that two people will show up at the same place simultaneously (or, depending on punctuality, thereabouts) when they agree upon a ‘time’ to do so. In all this evidence, however, it differs. They all describe ‘time’, but the concept of a simultaneous meeting is not the same as an agent of age, nor is the concept of changing from young to old the same as understanding the distinction between what one has experienced and still hopes to experience. The differences are not to be understood as dichotomous: they overlap, blur into multiplicity, trap each other in intertextuality. 

“Intertextuality” is the theoretical term used to describe the relationships between texts – that is, their references, connections and reflections. When T.S. Eliot writes how “[t]he Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed on the marble…” in The Waste Land, his poem engages in an intertextual relationship with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, reflecting Enobarbus’ poetic description of Antony’s first vision of Cleopatra: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water…” Intertextuality is generally more implicit than this example, and its recognition often changes the meaning of a particular text in significant ways. It might sound like a catachresis to relate intertextuality to the question of time, but I think the two terms are fundamental to one another. 

At base, both are constative. A text is intertextual because it refers to another text; time is intertextual because it refers to (an)other time. More significantly, comprehending how a text makes reference to other texts in its own construction shifts how we understand the final construct (the text in question). In a comparable way, time is something constructed through reference to a myriad of concepts, written and read. Comprehending these myriad concepts and the nature of their reference will fundamentally shift how we understand time. Time as an independent unknowable, or time as a negotiated entity always in a state of becoming.              

Whatever it is, time is central to the modernist condition. It’s inescapable. The stream of consciousness in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway takes time as its central referent. Mrs Dalloway’s narrative subjectivity, typical of many modernist novels, forces the reader into a dialogical relation with time as Clarissa Dalloway moves through London preparing for her party that evening, whilst time, simultaneously, sutures the narrative. The first time I read Woolf’s novel I breathed a prayer that I wouldn’t end up with it as one of my AS set-texts, turned back to page 1, and tried to make sense of the textual haze from which I’d emerged. Time had passed, and the novel showed that. But that’s all that I was sure of. Time is more intelligible in its embodiment as Death in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Death knows all, has seen all, awaits us at our beginning and holds us at our end. Death watches the colours of the sun, noting the time of day, not the loss of life. In Zusak’s novel, Death tells the story of one of his favourite lives, narrating time as an occupied experience. Time is thus simultaneously read and narrated. This simultaneity reflects perhaps our most pertinent condition of time: memory. 

Implicit to the narrative of both Woolf and Zusak, memory is unique in its capacity to engage the intertextual nature of time in one concept. Memory is of something past, remembered, constructed, represented or forgotten: time been and occupied. Memory is of this something past considered in the present, eternal: time considered and lived. Memory of this something past considered in the present has the ability to shape the future: time subjective and comprehended. The three are interdependent and mutually constitutive. One cannot exist without the other two, or it is not memory. 

And yet memory, whilst easily delineated into such a triad of being, is far from simple. It is instead inherently unreliable: the subject of misuse, fabrication, and loss, amongst other things. This unreliability in turn stems from its conditioning of time, given that time, as we have established, is itself largely unknown and generally complex. I think that’s why we’re so obsessed with both concepts, and goes someway to explaining the extent of their influence in and on our everyday. We tune our lives to the concept of time, from the waking and rest of our bodies to the very notion of life itself. We obsess over memory, from the use of past knowledge to facilitate our present capability (for example: I know how to speak from the example of my parents, first, and my encounters with all kind of mediums, from texts to people, second) to an innate compulsion to record the any and the every in digital pictures or written sentences that testify to our being in an imagined future. In both, we actively, if subconsciously, contribute to the on-going creation and negotiation of time. 

Parmenides considered time an illusion with no real existence. Plato, on the other hand, thought it an eternity independent of anything happening. Despite their difference, both philosophers point to the difficulty of defining exactly what time is and, unanimously, grant it ontology as an abstract continuity. That is, they take time as something that always has been, is, and always will be, no matter what happens, but something that, because of this innate pervasiveness (read: timelessness), can never be known in the definite sense. Time is therefore unknown. By implication, however, time is therefore known in the plural, ad infinitum. Time is a concept we will continue to wrestle, live and construct, not least in the complexity of memory. Time is ultimately, therefore, timeless.