I read an interesting article about "time" in the January Smithsonian Magazine. By the end of his life, Albert Einstein was convinced that linear time did not exist. Einstein's friend Michele Besso died a few weeks before he did in 1955, and Einstein wrote to the bereaved family:
This is not important. For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.
Today this is called the "block universe" view, meaning space and time are four-dimensional, rather than events unfolding in a linear way, as we like to think of our lives gently passing by.
This idea that time is an illusion didn't start with Einstein, but of course he had the science behind it. In Parmenides (one of the mind-twisting Dialogs of Plato) they make the argument that there is no such thing as change, because the entire universe is the set of all movements at once. Everything that ever happened, or ever will happen, is happening simultaneously, right now.
Ha! Maybe that's why I make the same resolutions each January:
1. Be less judgmental
2. Show more gratitude
3. Stop interrupting people!
4. Lose 10 pounds
(and so on...)
Einstein's rejection of absolute time had an impact on literature. Einstein was respected and articulate, and modern writers borrowed terms, images, and analogies from his scientific explanations. The poet T.S. Eliot writes about time in The Four Quartets, a long, complex poem about relationship and personal redemption. I especially love these lines:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
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