“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours.
Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser’s shimmering words, in the living moment that “we touch life and all the energy of the past and future”; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti’s shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.
The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with “a lament for life’s wasted sunshine.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of “great, genial, comprehending silences,” Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful.
In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:
All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our “own aspect” in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than “a mortal symptom of a person.” We can’t, he cautions, “use other people’s experience.” But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a “feeling within” of “what is true and what is false” without in order to have “the right perception of things.”
Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era’s equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes:
The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.
A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life:
Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.
In his time, the word “genius” retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one’s creative talent or intellectual prowess but one’s essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within.
Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes:
My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven.
[…]
I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books of all time.
“Fearlessness is what love seeks [which] exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” Hannah Arendt wrote in another of them, “hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
But upon closer inspection, now — this elementary particle of eternity, this tiny and total locus of the living moment, this constant that is never the same — turns out to be more elusive than a neutrino, passing through us ghostly and ungraspable, yet leaving in its wake the purest sum of what we are.
Like love, now is an entirely subjective experience built on a meaningful interaction between systems. Like love, it is not a state but a process — a dynamic creation that enlists all of our past experience and the entire pattern of predictive perceptions we call reality. Like love, it is more like music than like mathematics.
Jo Marchant takes up this elemental mystery in her excellent investigation In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment (public library), weaving together physics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural anthropology to expose the warp and weft of our aliveness, locating in the living now “the origins of both life and mind, the driving force that powers behaviours, perceptions, choices and decisions, that ultimately carves out self and time.”
She writes:
It isn’t a location within time at all, but what makes time possible. Now is nature itself: the experienced, evolving universe within which all time, and all life, is held.
Two centuries after the vitalism debate sundered science into warring camps over the search for a “vital spark” that makes matter alive, we are finding that conscious minds — that crowning achievement of matter — are made of time and bodies undone by it, that it is the fundamental substrate of our aliveness. If the moment is the vital spark of time, the science of now — divisive, thrilling, inconclusive — is the vitalism debate of our time.
It began when Einstein defeated Bergson in their historic debate. Relativity rendered the flow of time, and the immediacy of the moment nested within it, not a given of physical reality but a function of the vantage you take. “The baggage of consciousness,” Einstein himself called our sense of time in a letter to his best friend. Like all radical ideas, relativity sent the ideological pendulum in the opposite direction and the ancients’ notion of eternalism — the idea that time is absolute, the same in all directions, and all existence simply is, without dynamic being that flows from past to present to future — was revived in the modern model of the block universe, configuring spacetime as an unchanging four-dimensional block. Marchant describes the implications of that model:
Our lives aren’t unfurling plots or stories; they are intricate paths already mapped out in four dimensions… Every cell within your body — your neurons, muscle cells, the blood cells pulsing through your arteries, capillaries and veins — has its own intricate, interconnecting life path carved out through the block. And not just every cell, but every atom. Each of us is made up of trillions of strands in space-time, all with their own complex trajectory. Your whole life might look like a sort of tree carved into the block, with disparate strands coming together at one end, representing your conception and birth; gradually thickening into a trunk; and then at the other end splaying out into finer and finer branches before disintegrating completely at the point of your death and decomposition… There is no room for movement, flow or happening. Reality doesn’t become. It just is.
If the physicists are right, our attachment to the specialness of the present moment is just another example of how our limited perception deceives us, like thinking the sky turns or the Earth is flat.
Causality, this model implies, is simply an interpretation based on our limited perception: “The flow from past to future… rather than being a fundamental feature of the universe… emerges as a secondary consequence of our inability to see the full picture.”
Then there is the predictive coding model, under which “what we perceive — the vibrant, changing, three-dimensional reality all around us — isn’t the external world at all, but a guided prediction, or as some have described it, a ‘controlled hallucination’… a prediction built from our history, both recent impressions and a lifetime of experience.”
It is worth remembering here that what gives science its loveliness and potency, and what distinguishes it from philosophy, is the passion for building models of how nature works calibrated by the rigor of testing them against reality. And yet time may be the only region where the models are truly and fundamentally untestable because the modeler is a captive of time. Einstein’s equations gave us the mathematical foundation for the Big Bang, but not even Einstein could travel back to the beginning of time to see if the model was true. This may be why, to me, the most compelling — as well as the most poetic — portion of Merchant’s investigation is the most empirical: an fMRI study that analyzed the patterns of brain activity in people watching a movie, which has a built-in timeline, or simply resting, capturing one image per second and comparing how these images — these portraits of the moment — differ from one another in order to render the experience of time’s passage. Marchant details the astonishing revelation:
There isn’t a simple progression from one brain state to the next as time passes, with each moment most similar to its nearest neighbour. Our “brain patterns are not simply counting off the seconds,” says [study author Dan] Lloyd. Hidden within the sequences was an organised temporal structure, with regular patterns in the way that subjects’ brains moved back and forth between a small number of states. In fact, the structure he found is very like that of music. Lloyd identified short, repeating motifs, or themes: sequences of states, between 4 and 11 seconds long, that look similar to each other. Often these themes recurred at constant time intervals: he called that “rhythm.” These rhythms appeared at a range of different timescales, and sometimes these frequencies were related to each other, so that they nested within one another perfectly. Lloyd called this structure “harmony” because it is analogous to the harmonic vibrations that give musical instruments, from violins to saxophones, their rich, resonant sound.
What this “harmony” means is that at any single moment, our spontaneous brain activity is made up of multiple, overlaid patterns and rhythms, which are related yet change over different timescales: just like our experience of Now. Each moment of neural activity is influenced by what’s happened in both the near and further past, and in turn influences what will happen in the near and further future. The results “suggest a human capacity to spread out from the immediate present tense of sensation, towards an overall temporal landscape,” Lloyd concludes. This explains how we can navigate fast-changing events yet at the same time hold on to stable threads of where we’re going and who we are.
An epoch before neuroimaging, Virginia Woolf intuited this truth when she considered the “moments of being” that make us who we are, intuited the musicality of being alive: “The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art,” she wrote in her breathtaking epiphany in the middle of the garden, “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
Looking through the kaleidoscope of the various models, Marchant considers the essence of the light:
It seems our perception of Now is a combination of two crucial factors: the ability to bind a hierarchy of different timescales together within each moment; and the inexorable progression from one moment to the next. This highly ordered temporal composition underpins our flowing stream of consciousness. Passing time is not just a characteristic we perceive: it is the underlying frame or structure through which we experience reality.
And yet it may be more important even than that, underpinning not just our world but who we are.
Our lives, Marchant argues, are only really alive, only ever real, as the moment lives itself through us:
The perceptions and sensations themselves — the call and response, the meeting or thwarting of predictions — these are reality. These are what existence is made of… Our perceptions or experiences — the melancholy of raindrops on a window, the exhilaration of diving into an icy pool — are real in themselves. There is no separate, enduring landscape beyond that they’re based on, no solid reference point against which our sensations can be judged.
[…]
Now has objective meaning as the expanding boundary at which reality is continually created. What’s coming into being includes not just the contents of the universe but its very structure. As new events occur, new universe — new space-time — is being born.
With an eye to all the different models of physics she examines in the book — relativity, the block universe, enactivism, and predictive coding among them — she ends where we ought to always begin: the discipline of not mistaking the model for the thing itself:
Do we exist as frozen snapshots or mathematical braids? Are we logic-bound computers or dynamic hurricanes? Are we living in a mental realm of shadows, separated from true reality by impenetrable, iron-like walls? Or are our perceptions real, while the familiar things of our world — even time and space themselves — are mere statistical structures, predictions that help us to manage our flow of sensations and stay alive?… Perhaps with all these possibilities there’s no way even to approach what lies beyond us, beyond our senses, beyond this point in time… All any of us can ever really know is that this moment exists. Maybe that’s enough. What we’re sensing and feeling, right here, right now, is real and undeniable, precisely because we are experiencing it.
Because there is no commons of now, the moment is the measure of our loneliness in time, but also the only region of space where we flower into being fully ourselves in a constant bloom of becoming.
What we perceive or experience in any moment is so personal, so utterly bound up in our individual history and biology, that it doesn’t make sense to speak of any “true,” definitive way of things outside that process… Our inner worlds — from feeling ownership of our bodies to experiencing emotions or recalling our life stories — are complex webs of probabilistic inferences, ever-changing depending on our circumstances, and recreated in each moment. There are no separate, enduring “selves” sitting behind… [We] exist as dynamic, living patterns of personal experiences, not stand-alone things. There’s no external stage on which we’re acting, no pre-existing terrain into which we’ve been parachuted. And, on the other side of the coin, there’s no pre-existing “us” either: no floating essences or souls ready to cast their gaze on the world.
This is not a negation of our being but an affirmation of it — a liberation from the tyranny and tedium of selfing we mistake for being:
What if instead of enduring entities — you and me, Earth and Sun — there are only the instants, the interactions? Only the burgeoning, interconnected, multilayered meshwork of creative sparks? From those sparks emerge selves and worlds — our private worlds of perception but also shared frameworks and structures: social, cultural, historical, scientific. Each instant, all of it is born and reborn.
[…]
Our experience of Now, I’m convinced, is not a hallucination. With every detail we choose to attend to, to breathe life into, we’re helping to write into existence both ourselves and the world… What if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but, as Wheeler put it, “in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us”? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle.
Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .
Perhaps, with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.
“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,” Borges wrote. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience.
And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)
Not knowing what to do with the time we have been given, not knowing how to hold time in our personal and political lives, is at bottom an act of forgetting how time hold us. Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) casts a spell against forgetting in the fourth canto of his long poem “Morning,”:
You will remember that whimsical ravine
where the vibrant aromas rose,
and from time to time a bird dressed
in water and languor: winter’s garment.
You will remember those gifts from the earth:
piquing fragrance, gold clay,
thickets of herbs, wild roots,
bewitching thorns like swords.
You will remember the bouquet you brought,
a bouquet of shadow and silent water,
a bouquet like foam-covered stone.
And that time was like never and always:
We go where nothing is expected
and find everything waiting there.
Pablo Neruda
If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have “touched time,” reverenced the minute for how it is “bound to join the river of time that bears us,” reverenced “the inexhaustible springs of time,” longed for “a time complete as an ocean,” then made that ocean with his poetry.
In his poem “The Enigmas,” composed during WWII, he writes:
You’ve asked me what the crustacean spins
between its gold claws
and I reply: the sea knows.
You wonder what the sea squirt waits for in its transparent bell?
What does it wait for?
I’ll tell you: it’s waiting for time like you.
A decade later, in one of his “Elemental Odes,” Neruda laid out his most explicit instruction for how to hold time:
Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.
An organism is a mortal unit of matter distinct from other organisms by its genome — the possibilities encoded in its particular genetic makeup — and its phenotype — the set of traits expressed, the actualities summoned by adaptation and chance from its possibilities. Human beings are organisms encased in the hardest yet most vulnerable exoskeleton in nature: a self. A self includes but surpasses the organism to encompass its environment and its social context, the psychological terrain of memory and desire, the fingerprints left on it by the touch of other selves. An organism ends at the physical boundary of its body, but a self does not — we spend our lives negotiating where we end and the world begins.
Humans are the only animals, save perhaps the bowerbird, who can alter their phenotype by means of their own making — grow, cut, and dye their hair, tattoo and tan their skin, increase and decrease the size of various body parts with scalpel and silicone. We are also the only animal who can radically alter both its environment and its social context, building elaborate homes on faraway landmasses, reconstituting our families and friend groups, changing the labors by which we put food on our table. Our selves are not like our cells, replacing themselves with clones in the course of living, but like Russian nesting dolls, each prior self outgrown but contained by the next. (“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion wrote.) Our lives a relay race, running from the selves we have outgrown or wish to outgrow towards the selves we try to become to or are unconsciously becoming, the baton of personhood passed from one to the next along the arrow of time, the track of our mortality.
This puts us in a peculiar predicament: Each human lifetime is lived by a single organism that contains a multitude of selves, genetically continuous and psychologically discontinuous, making it impossible to define where and what the person is. What, then, makes you yourself across all those replaced cells and reconfigured selves?
The Pando aspen grove in Utah comprises 47,000 trees, all genetically identical, connected by a vast root system. Language immediately becomes limiting when trying to describe Pando. Do we call the forest an organism? An entity? It has been estimated to weigh nearly 6 million kilograms, or 6,000 tonnes. If it helps, that’s about thirty-five blue whales or 1,000 elephants. It is one of the oldest organisms on Earth. Its cells are living and dying over time, but the DNA remains pretty much unchanged. That is, the entity lives on, even as its parts die.
With an eye to the Ship of Theseus — Plutarch’s timeless thought experiment about the nature of the self — he reflects:
Pando is biology’s Ship of Theseus — is it the same tree as when it first sprouted? I think not. It’s more like a continuation of the idea of Pando… The 47,000 stems of Pando start off genetically the same, but grow phenotypically different; a forest, but also a mass of individuals.
“The word for world is forest,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her subtle insistence that symbiosis — the ultimate unselfing of the organism — is what made this rocky planet a living world. Rustling through the canopy of the Pando is the whisper of an answer to the unnerving question of what makes a body a person: You are not your roots, not the stem of your circumstance, not your branching choices. You are the idea of you, the forest of your selves in constant conviviality with other selves, called again and again to unself into who you really are.
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