the disappearance of time

The sprawl of highways, the hub and spoke of airplane trajectories, combined with the electronic network of telecommunications are monuments to our domination of space.

As we have dominated space, we have also rushed along. Consultants break the day at dawn to catch their next plane. Soccer mums shuttle their children back and forth from practices and playdates with her soup in a can in the cupholder of her SUV. A graduate student types away in the dim light of the library. Late at night, a corporate vice president frets over revenue and expense figures of his division, on which his compensation depends.

And it’s good news to hear that GDP per capita has gone up, because that means that our standard of living has improved.

In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective… To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.

We like to live as though time does not exist, as though the ticking bomb of our mortality has been silenced. We live as though we can take all the things that we’ve acquired in our time here on earth with us when we die:

… to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the border of time. But time is the heart of existence.

Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face… Is joy of possessions an antidote to the terror of time which grows to be a dread of inevitable death? Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives; we are more harassed than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things.

Bertrand Russell writes that time is "an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality… A certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophical thought… to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom."

But perhaps we have failed to enter the city of wisdom because we’ve forgotten about the importance time, and have only focused on space (Perhaps because we can control space, while time eludes us). And thus much of our labor is in vain, and we spend much of our time chasing forgeries of happiness.

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Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What we plead against is man's unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is a moment that lends significance to things.



* Unless otherwise noted, all italicized text is from Jewish writer Abraham Heschel’s book The Sabbath