The Fullness of Time, 2026, Anon
Hour You Doin’?
As a bear of very little brain, it takes not a lot to confuse your Director. Twice a year, for example, I am reminded that not only do I fail to understand time, but that we as a species have decided to start editing it. This past weekend, the Great Temporal Gearbox shifted once more as I lay awake in my bed at Director’s Towers in the early hours of Sunday. As I studied the aperiodic Penrose tiling on my ceiling, I felt no accompanying lurch as Time sprang forward; rather, 1:00 am was instantly replaced on my bedside Teasmade by 2:00 am; an altogether too clean a manoeuvre for my liking.
I subsequently spent much of that Sunday morning staring at the digital readout of the time on the microwave. Sadly, this is but one of an increasing number of items in Director’s Towers which appear to require a PhD to adjust. You can, dear reader, no doubt picture the scene: your Director watching his lentil soup bubble away through the safety glass, contemplating the sheer, faintly absurd audacity of the human race. Here we are, deciding that we can simply edit the day and so we take the cosmic shears and lop off sixty minutes of our lives without so much as a by your leave.
It is a peculiar sort of magic where we think we can add time by changing its name. So, with your indulgence, allow me to share my befuddlement and direct a few paltry words in the direction of the rider of the old winged chariot itself, your friend and mine, perhaps; Time.
Thanks to the suggestion of our incomparably brilliant LRC manager, Ms Galvin, I have recently embarked upon Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, a novel that treats the fourth dimension with the sort of weary administrative cynicism usually reserved for the VAT office. In Bradley’s world, time is a resource to be harvested, and expats from different eras are brought into the present under the watchful eye of bridges, civil servants tasked with acclimatising a Victorian explorer or a seventeenth century casualty to the wonders of Spotify, instant noodles, and the quiet existential despair of buffering.
It makes me wonder if our own obsession with time management is not a form of hubris. We fill out teacher planners and set Pomodoro timers as though we were the Directors of our own private Ministries. We treat time as a commodity to be saved, spent, or wasted, as though it were a currency we had first minted rather than a mystery we have barely begun to notice. And as any viewer of Doctor Who knows, time rarely behaves like a well filed ledger.
The Doctor once described time as a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff. While that may lack the rigour of a peer reviewed paper, it feels far more honest to my lived experience. Some minutes can last for several lifetimes. I recall for example, those moments spent standing perfectly still in my tailor’s shop while he measures and ums and ahs whilst no doubt deliberating quite how many extra inches must be added to my new suit trousers. On the other hand, years, the last twenty, for instance, can seem to have evaporated in the blink of an eye. If the Doctor teaches us anything, it is that time is not a road but a sea, and we are often very poor sailors.
When my own internal compass fails, I usually turn to the giants of physics, only to find that they are even more disruptive than a springtime clock change. Take friend of the Column, Albert Einstein. Before him, we lived in a comfortable Newtonian universe where time was an absolute, a universal metronome ticking away in the background of existence. Einstein shattered that metronome. He showed us that time is relative. It stretches near a heavy mass and slows down as you approach the speed of light. Wonderfully, he also suggested that the distinction between past, present, and future is merely a stubbornly persistent illusion.
In the Block Universe theory, every moment that has ever happened or will ever happen exists simultaneously. My befuddled Sunday morning and your reading of this column are both eternally there, etched into the four dimensional fabric of spacetime. If Einstein unsettled time at the cosmic scale, quantum physics proceeds to dismantle it altogether.
Then we must contend with Richard Feynman, the bongo-playing, safe-cracking rogue genius of the quantum world, who treated the so-called Arrow of Time with the sort of casual disregard I, in my more rebellious moments, treat ‘Best Before’ dates. Feynman’s diagrams, those elegant little squiggles that mapped the subatomic world, suggest something truly rebellious: that at the level of the very small, time is not a one-way street. He posited that a positron (an anti-electron) could be mathematically viewed as nothing more than a standard electron that had simply decided to travel backwards in time.
Imagine the implications for our own linear lives. It would be as if I could decide, upon reaching the office and realizing I’d forgotten my spectacles, to simply positron my way back to the breakfast table without ever having left it. In Feynman’s universe, the future can influence the past as easily as I might influence the choice of biscuits in the staffroom. It suggests a world where regret is a physical impossibility because the path back is always open. Provided you are small enough.
But Feynman’s truly dizzying contribution was the Path Integral. In our macroscopic, Director’s Towers world, if I wish to travel from my armchair to the sideboard to pour a modest sherry, I take the most direct route (obvs). However, Feynman’s Sum Over Histories tells us that a subatomic particle is not quite so sedate.
According to Feynman, a particle travelling from A to B does not choose a single path. Instead, it takes every possible path simultaneously. It goes via the local post office; it takes a scenic detour through the rings of Saturn; it nips across to the 14th century for a quick look around; and it arrives at its destination having experienced every conceivable journey in the history of the universe. It is only when we ‘look’ at it, that all those wild, wandering paths ‘collapse’ into a single, boring straight line.
It is perhaps comforting to extrapolate. There are days when I feel I have achieved absolutely nothing of note; days when the To Do list remains as pristine at 5:00 pm as it was at 7:00 am. But if Feynman is right, perhaps my quantum self has been extraordinarily busy. While I have been sitting in a meeting, a version of me has likely been exploring the libraries of Alexandria, orbiting a distant pulsar, and finally mastering the cryptic crossword in the Times.
In this imagination, I am not points on a line; instead a shimmering cloud of possibilities, taking every path at once, only occasionally settling down to be your Director when someone happens to knock on the office door.
If a single electron can be in ten places at once and travel backwards to meet itself for coffee, it is perhaps no wonder that I struggle to synchronise my watch with the BBC pips. We are made of these particles. We are essentially walking, talking quantum paradoxes trying to fit ourselves into a nine to five schedule.
And then there is literature, which has probably always been better at capturing the smell of time than physics. Think of dear Marcel Proust. In In Search of Lost Time, he does not use a stopwatch; he uses a tea soaked cake. The taste of a petite madeleine triggers a vast structure of recollection.
For Proust, time is not a line but a series of concentric circles. We carry our past selves within us like the rings of a tree. The Director who struggled with long division in 1984 is still present, buried just beneath the Director who is currently writing this column. In this way, when we remember something vividly, we are not simply looking at a photograph; we are time travelling. We are folding the fabric of our lives so that two distant points touch.
Or, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, time present and time past may both be present in time future.
Then there is Virginia Woolf, who in Mrs Dalloway uses the leaden circles of Big Ben’s chime to tether her characters to a shared reality. But while the clock strikes for everyone, the experience of the hour is entirely private. Clarissa Dalloway’s hour is not the same as Septimus Smith’s hour. We live in private currents of time, occasionally brushing against one another at the photocopier.
This of course brings us to the work of Iain McGilchrist (Bingo!) The left hemisphere loves the clock. It loves the sixty minute hour because it can be divided, sold, and measured. It sees time as a series of static snapshots like the frames of a film. But the right hemisphere understands what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus meant when he said panta rhei, everything flows. You cannot step into the same river twice. By the time you dip your toe a second time, both the river and you have changed.
McGilchrist suggests that we have lost the ability to live in the flow. We are so busy measuring the water that we have forgotten how to swim. When we are truly engaged in something, a piece of music, a painting, a difficult task, or a deep love, time disappears. We enter a state of flow where the ticks of the clock become irrelevant. This, perhaps, is the only real time there is. The rest is merely the bookkeeping of existence.
Of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who distinguished between temps and durée.
Temps is the time of science and the Ministry. It is spatialised; we imagine it as dots on a line. It is the time we edit. But durée is the time of the soul. It is mobile, fluid, and heterogeneous. It is the time we actually live. Bergson used the analogy of a melody. If you break a song down into individual notes, you lose the music. The music only exists in the flow between the notes.
Our lives are a melody, yet we spend so much of our energy arguing over the sheet music. We worry about being on time for meetings, but we rarely worry about being in time with ourselves.
So where does this leave your befuddled Director?
I am caught between the Ministry and the River. Part of my job requires me to live in the world of Einsteinian block time, planning budgets for next year, scheduling meetings for next month, and pretending that I have a firm grasp on the one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week.
But the bear of very little brain in me knows that this is a grand performance. Deep down, I suspect that the stolen hour from last Sunday did not go anywhere. It is still here, tucked behind a Feynman diagram or hidden in the crumbs of a Proustian madeleine.
Perhaps the secret to a well lived life is to treat the clock with a healthy dose of scepticism. Respect the sprung forward hour enough to get to the office, but ignore it enough to realise that your most important moments will not be found on a dial.
So, as we navigate the coming holiday weeks of ‘lost time,’ I suspect I shall try to stop measuring the river quite so obsessively. I might even let the Ministry wait in the waiting-room while I misplace my pocket watch entirely. For if Einstein is right and the past and future are merely persistent illusions, then this ‘Now’, singular, wibbly-wobbly, and faintly madeleine-scented, is a far better place to be than stuck in a digital jump from one o’clock to two.
And if you see me wandering the corridors looking particularly confused, please do not check your watch. I am simply waiting for my right hemisphere to catch up with the microwave.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Being on Time!
Director’s Detritus #8
The Stolen Eleven Days: We might think our lost hour is a modern inconvenience. Imagine the confusion in 1752 when Britain finally adopted the Gregorian calendar. Upon declaring that Wednesday, September 2nd would be immediately followed by Thursday, September 14th, the populace was so enraged at the perceived theft of eleven days that riots erupted in the streets of London with the cry: ‘Give us back our eleven days!’ It is comforting to know that the ancestors were just as easily confused by the Great Gearbox as your Director.