elizabethlevett

It’s late May, 1980. I’m sitting in a small classroom in San Diego. I’m twenty. There are only seven of us, me and a bunch of seminarians. Our university was, at the time, very small. The philosophy department was really small. Only nine of us in the upper division classes had taken philosophy as a major. A bunch of seminarians and me and a guy named Buck Felty who had suffered a brain injury playing football and now liked gazing at the horizon and talking about life. Buck is not in the room. Classes cut into his time surfing. Oh well. The professor comes in and sits down. A couple of the seminarians pull a bottle of Lowenbrau out of a case they’ve brought to class and hand one to him. Dr. Hurley. He’s our professor for Metaphysics and today is our final exam. He decides that we’ll drink the beers and talk instead. Dr. Hurley is young, not young like his students, not as young as Dr. Rohatyn, but certainly younger than Dr. Donnelly or Dr. Hinman. Dr. Hurley has dark hair worn short, straight, flat, with bangs that meet the metal frames of his glasses and a Charlie Chaplin moustache. He’s wearing one of those marvelous polyester shirts with a scenic silkscreen pattern on it. He raises the bottle of beer to his bluish lips, leans back and looks at us. Then he fingers the bottle lovingly and tosses his head back weakly as he asks us, “So what do you think time is, REALLY?”

I can’t remember what I said. I can’t remember what any of us said, come to think of it. A couple of the seminarians might have said something clever, a couple of others might have laughed. As the only female in the whole damn department, I like to think I said something really cool, but I honestly can’t claim that I did. What do you think time is, REALLY?

I am fairly certain someone in the group suggested that time is just a construct. It was a popular thing to say. There are actually schools of philosophers who get into suggesting various models of time. Serialists, sequentialists. Seriously. People have gotten grant money to hang around and speculate on the nature of time. They say to each other: Time is like a stream you stand in; the stream moves but you don’t. (Unless you slip on a rock and float, drift, paddle, spawn, etc.) Or time is like a book, you turn a page each day. Can you leaf back to the beginning? Can you skip ahead to the end? (Why would anyone want to travel in time? Why? Didn’t we learn the folly of that notion from Star Trek?) Now, with the science emerging from the study of the brain and black holes, there are even more theories of time. Version A, Version B, time is without tense, on and on. (There’s Charlie Chaplin’s mustache again. He’s wearing a greasy coverall and tightening the bolts of a huge machine that looks just like a giant version of the inside of my dad’s pocket watch.) I have to say I just don’t get it. To claim that the nature of time relies solely on our perception depends on accepting the primacy of the human brain. Seasons come. Seasons go. Time has not been constructed. Our perception of time may be constructed just as calendars have been constructed. Clocks have been constructed. But time is a thing. Really.

Time is just a construct? That’s what indulgent parents like to say so they won’t have to tell their children to go to bed, don’t want them to have to deal with a schedule. Really? What happens when you want to have a conversation with another adult and your child sees no reason to go to bed? No schedule, no boundaries, no ability to deal. What happens when they have to catch a bus, or a plane, or a job interview? Once puberty starts they will find out that time is not a construct. Time is real. It’s a thing. The tides come in, the tides go out.

We had a cat once we called Pete. It was a nickname for Posidonius, the stoic. Pete was a stoic cat. He had lived outside for nine years when we finally took him to the vet and decided he really was our cat since we paid the bill for all the stuff that was wrong with him. Pete had diabetes. He roamed the neighborhood all day doing God only knows what with God only knows who. But every morning at 5 sharp, Pete let us know he was ready for his insulin and his breakfast. (If you don’t have a cat, you’ll ask how he let us know. Male cats are pretty vocal. Look it up.) And every evening at 5 sharp, he came in for his dinner and the evening shot. If a cat knows what time it is, time is a thing.

Seasons come. Seasons go. Babies are born, cakes bake, water boils, old people die. When spring comes the freesias bloom and asparagus shows up at the market. Little grasses shoot up everywhere just in time for fur shedding season. (Hairballs. Look it up.) Summer brings aphids, but also ladybugs and bushtits who will swarm my ceanothus to make a meal of the aphids. Just when it starts to get cold in the autumn there are carrots and potatoes for warming up in a pot of stew and it’s dark for going to bed early. It all makes sense. And it’s perfect. It’s not a construct, because we are not capable of constructing it. In the time we have can only construct so much. How we perceive it may be up for grabs, but time was real long before we got here and it will go on being real long after we leave.