Time is the great deception
…and yet I believe that time itself doesn’t exist. It is the parade of events that we use to mark our place in
the great play in which we participate.
How can it be that time doesn’t exist? Clearly we see the hands on the clock move around and the leaves of the calendar turn. Surely that is the passage of a linear something that we call time? But no. Think of a movie film reel wound into its’ can. The whole story exists at once tucked into the can. The illusion of a linear something is produced one frame at a time but all frames exist at once. It is only our viewpoint that changes. We who are embedded in the strip cannot see it from the outside and so have no realization of the whole. Nor can we rewind. Once a frame is gone it is gone forever to us and we can never return to it again.
The moving hand writes
And, having writ, moves on.
Not all thy piety nor all thy wit can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all the tears wash out a word of it.
(From the Rubiyat of Omar Kayam)
Filed under: reality, reflections | Tagged: Time
