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Article - Time is God, Don't Waste it.
The Weekend Australian Review
By Phillip Adams

Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladmir: Yes, but not so rapidly.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett It's time. What's the time? Time will tell. Time and tide wait for no man. The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things. There is a time and a place for everything. From time to time it's said that time is what prevents everything from happening at once. yet the scientific consensus seems to be that, in a sense, everything does occur simultaneously.

Any number of fine minds - most recently Professor Paul Davies and my friend Darryl Reanney who promptly ran out of it - have tried to explain to me that times past, present and future coexist. We're to think of them as different places on a map that we could see in its entirety if we were clever enough. Einstein, another noble intellect, the bloke who revealed time's relativity, was forever telling people that the idea of past, present and future was an illusion.

Joan Lindsay, who called her autobiography Time Without Clocks, believed that Einstein was right. Amused by the number of chronometric devices I'd collected, Joan reminded me that her home was a clock-free zone - that she refused to wear a watch "because whenever I do, they simply stop on my wrist". Smiling mysteriously she told me that her disbelief in sequential time was the key to the mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

I'd like to understand, even to believe in, the illusory nature of time. Trouble is, it's got me completely flummoxed. Because everything points to time's passing, inexorability, remorselessness. Your face, as much as the clock's tells the time. Look into the mirror and you'll near the chimes at midnight. Look at the rings in a tree, the waves on the shore, the sun, the stars, the geological layerings. Consider your accumulation of regrets and the ticking becomes as loud as drum beats in a dirge, as sledgehammer blows.

Time is odourless, tasteless, nebulous, invisible. You can't preserve it in frozen nitrogen or put it in a bottle. Yet it's the driving force of everything we know, have and are. Time is the great sculptor of galaxies and the juggler of genes. It turns the dust of creation into planets and polyps, comets and caterpillars, into consciousness itself. Though blind, dumb and stupid, time keeps modelling and remodelling the clay of existence and, again and again, stumbles on a new shape, a new form, that can be fired in its ovens. Imagine a world without time - the frames stop tumbling through the projector, the image freezes and is destroyed. So while time, in time, takes everything away, it is still the author of that everything.

I've been obsessed with time ever since I comprehended that it went on forever. Okay, 20th century scientific metaphysics argues against this notion, insisting that time, along with space, came into being with the Big Bang - and may end with the Big Crunch. Between now and then? Well, a few billion years is a fairly long timeframe, eternal for all practical purposes.

As a little child I'd lie in bed feeling terrified by time's never-endingness and by the corollary of eternity, infinity. I'd measure my tininess and tiny life against these unimaginable immensities and would be overwhelmed by a great dread, at once numbing and exhilarating. The thought that my time would come to end so soon, so very soon - while all eternity stretched on before me. And, yes, behind me: the realisation that my consciousness was just a spark in an endless darkness was the most overwhelming thought I had to face. Have ever had to face.

Yet from the age of five I'd accepted the truth of it, because it was impossible to imagine a timeless existence, a timeless universe. I found the only way to cope with the idea was to scale the great cosmic enterprise down to the provincial, the personal. Subjectively, at least, time ad begun when I was born and would end when I died. So, in a sense, I would live for all the time there was.

It's a pitiful attempt to deal with the terror of time, but it's at least as reassuring as what Einstein, Davies and dear dead Darryl had to say about it. That time's a delusion. You may not be able to see it, touch it or smell it but you feel it blowing through you like a wind.

To us, nothing is more precious than time, not even fame or money. Yet killing time seems to be our principal preoccupation. In what has to be the ultimate blasphemy people waste time, precious, fleeting, insubstantial and allegedly illusory time, by staring blankly at television screens or absenting themselves from life's astonishments in religious communities, or giving themselves up to the anaesthesia of habit. For me, that agonisingly evanescent phenomenon that evaporates between the future and the past, between the two great deaths (the one that precedes life and the one that follows it) has to be used as an aphrodisiac for existence. We must use time to energise ourselves, to kindle our enthusiasm, to encourage us to experiment, innovate, risk.

There's a character in Catch 22 called called Dunbar who's so appalled by the prospect of death that he does everything he can to stretch the experience of time. He only goes to a film if he's already seen it and didn't enjoy it in the first place. He only reads boring books that he already knows from cover to cover. He seeks out dull acquaintances and encourages tedious conversation. Dunbar is an extreme example of a common phenomenon - the person for whom nothing ventured is something gained.

Children experience time in the same way as Dunbar. Remember how it took years for the clock on the classroom wall to free you from the tyranny of an endless afternoon? Remember how you ran down the school path, rejoicing in the prospect of Christmas holidays - and how they invariably went on too long? That experience, of time passing too slowly, passes with time. The older you get the faster it travels until, finally, its winds blow you off your feet.

But there's another variation on the Dunbar theme - people who waste time as though they had it in abundance. People who treat every succeeding day as matter-of-factly as if it was something that was delivered with the milk or newspaper, as if there were going to be millions of days, an endless supply of days, instead of 26000 in an average lifetime. These are the people who cling to rituals, depending on the regularity and familiarity of television, footy and endless reruns of identical social occasions.

Occasions like birthday parties, those calamities we characterise as joyous. Candles do not represent something gained but something lost. Another 365 days. Mind you, the symbolism is ambivalent. We light a forest of candles and the glow makes our face shine. Then, in a moment of truth, we blow the candles out. It's a little death - a final breath to plunge us into gloom.

I wrote of sparks, Rabindranath Tagore of fireflies. In a work of that name, published in 1928, he said "the butterfly counts on months but moments and has time enough". And perhaps he's right. There is a theory that, by and large, living creatures have about the same number of heartbeats. A bird's heart, though it beats very fast, beats as often as a turtle's, as a whale's , as an elephant's, as a man's. The theory suggests that the rapidity of a heartbeat is a measure not only of metabolic processes but perception - so that a little creature with a heart that beats in a blur sees the world slowed to a fraction of what we, human beings, perceive. If this is true, it's a bit like changing the speed in a movie camera. At 24 frames a second, the camera shows the world pretty much as we see it. Run a hundred or a thousand frames through a camera in a second - it can be done - and you can watch the leisurely progress of a bullet from a barrel to target. And take just one shot a second and you can watch an entire day compressed into an hour.

Is Dunbar right to try to live life in slowmo? Or is what he does counter productive? In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann writes: "When one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares." Writing of his experiences in a prison, Arthur Koestler said much the same. That time in a Spanish prison, being featureless, had absolutely no substance.

Most human beings seem to want to pack a lot into an hour, a day, a life. Which is why we've been driving time ever more relentlessly. There was a time when people guessed at time by the position of the sun or moon, by the length of the shadows. Then a single clock appeared in the village, high above in the church tower. A clock with only an hour hand. The minute hand would come later. And later still the second hand appeared sweeping around the dial. By then clocks were in profusion. And we began to divide time into hundredths, thousandths and then millionths of a second and, in doing so, pressed the accelerator on our lives and so, pressed the accelerator on our lives and on the pace of our perceptions.

Until a moment ago in time, prior to the rise of technology, we lived in a natural world where moods were slow to chance. Unless, that is, we were confronted by a threat. Then the hit of adrenalin would increase the metabolic rate and, yes, slow down perception, so that an experience seemed to stretch out, to hover in the air.

Now, in the 1990's, we sit in front of television sets where time, along with emotional equilibrium, is shattered. We are wrenched from butcheries in the Balkans to a McDonald's commercial to African famines to a promo for Seinfeld to The X Files while simultaneously taking in the Lotto results on the bottom of every screen. Everything interrupts everything. One wonders what this acceleration in time is doing to our psyche, our sanity. It may be that we're better off - that even a bewilderment of sensations is better than the stultifications of boredom. Yet I suspect that we're suffering a deeper boredom than humans have known - a boredom that we try to escape by pressing the fast forward button. Is that a rising scream of human despair or just the Doppler effect?

The longer we live, the quicker we live, the more rapidly we are bored. A corollary of our increasing tempo lies in our unwillingness to wait, in our demand for instant gratification. Consequently we are infuriated by an languor in our laptops, by any sluggishness in automotive performance.

Whether you try to stop time in its tracks, like Dunbar, or swing from pendulum to pendulum like Tarzan on his vines, whether you put your head in the sand or the stars, the future is something which reaches you at the rate of 60 minutes an hour. While I've never been persuaded that there is a God, I am persuaded that time exists, and does so in a very big way. Moreover time has many of the qualities that we ascribe to God - being eternal and omniscient. Whether moving mountains or dabbling in human affairs, time is supreme. Like old man river, just another of a million metaphors, it just keeps rolling along.

Time has many pseudonyms, one of them being life. Another is, of course, death. Time is also the greatest of all teachers. But, sadly, it kills all its pupils.

Thanks for your time.

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