“If our heart was big enough to love to live in all its details, we would see at once what a thief it is,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in the early 1930s considering our paradoxical knowledge of time. “The inclusion of man and his limited life span that transforms the continuous flow of total change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, place, and our thinking. Time, in other words – especially our experience of it as a succession of moments – is an illusion of the mind rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construct of human consciousness and perhaps the true hallmark of human consciousness.
Bachelard and Arendt were arrested Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986), that anti-mysticist and great poet of the time, who addressed this confusion in his 1946 essay. “New Age Resistance,” remains the most beautiful, erudite, and entertaining reflection on the subject yet. Later it was included Labyrinths (public library) – a 1962 collection of Borges' stories, essays, illustrations, and other writings, which gave us his haunting and timeless image of isolation.
Borges begins by noting the deliberate irony of his subject, which contradicts his main theory that the continuity of time is imaginary, that time exists without sequence and that each moment contains all eternity, which destroys the very idea of ”newness.” The “little teasing” of the title, he notes, is his way of showing that “our language is saturated and translated by time.” With his self-extinguishing warmth, Borges warns that his story may be “anachronistic. reductio ad absurdum of the preterite system or, worse, the weak art of an Argentine lost in the maze of metaphysics” – then he continues to deliver the art of speaking and thinking, driven by the wings of unusual poetic beauty.
Writing in the mid-1940s – a quarter century after Einstein defeated Bergson in their historic debate, when science (“clarity of metaphysics,” according to Borges) finally won the place of time that had been competing from the tyranny of metaphysics, and just a few years after Bergson himself went out into eternity – Borges considers his whole life. books:
In the course of life devoted to books and (sometimes) to metaphysical confusion, I have observed or foreseen the opposition of time, which I myself do not believe, but which visits me every night and tired night with the deceptive power of the axiom.
Time, Borges notes, is the basis of our experience of personal identity – something that philosophers took up significantly in the 17th century, poets took up in the 19th, scientists settled down in the 20th, and psychologists went back in the 21st.
Borges compares the views of the Anglo-Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley, the main champion of idealistic metaphysics, and his Scottish peer and contemporary, David Hume. The two differ on the existence of personal identity – Berkeley approved it as “an active system of thought that sees itself” at the center of each person, while Hume denied it, saying that each person is “a mass or collection of different ideas, succeeding each other with inconceivable rapidity” – but both affirm the existence of time.
Passing through this field of philosophy, Borges sketches what he calls “this unstable mental world” in relation to time:
A land of strange ideas; a world without matter or spirit, without purpose or independence, a world without good atmospheric formation; a world made in time, of exactly the same time [Newton’s] The Principia; an endless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream.
Returning to Hume's idea of the delusional man – an idea developed by Eastern philosophy a thousand years earlier – Borges looks at how this destroys the very concept of time as we know it:
Behind our faces there is no secret self that governs our actions and receives our thoughts; we are only a series of these imaginary actions and these misconceptions.
But even the idea of a “series” of actions and impressions, Borges suggests, is misleading because time cannot be separated from matter, spirit, and space:
If the issue with the spirit – which is something that goes on – has been ignored, if the place has been abandoned, I don't know what right we have to keep that continuity that is time. Without individual perception (real or imaginary) matter does not exist; without each state of mind the spirit does not exist; and there is no time except the present moment.
He epitomizes the paradox of the present – the paradox in which he finds himself all of them the present moment – by guiding us to one familiar moment in literature:
During one of his nights in Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn wakes up; the raft, lost in the partial darkness, continues down the river; maybe a little cold. Huckleberry Finn notices the soft, tireless sound of water; he opens his eyes carelessly; he sees dim stars, a dim line of trees; then, he sinks down into his unremembered sleep as if he were in black water. Idealist metaphysics declares that adding a physical object (object) and a spiritual object (subject) to those ideas is experimental and useless; I conclude that it is also absurd to think that such ideas are words in a chain whose beginning is as inconceivable as its end. In addition to the river and the bank, Huck sees the vision of another great river and another bank, to add another vision to that rapid network of visions, is to be, in theory, unjustifiable; in my opinion, it is also not worth adding chronological precision: the fact, for example, that the above event happened on the evening of the seventh of June, 1849, between ten and eleven minutes after four o'clock. In other words: I deny, with the arguments of idealism, the great temporal chain that is positive. Hume denied the existence of absolute space, where all things have their place; I deny the existence of a single time, when all things are connected like a chain. Denying coexistence is not as difficult as denying succession.
This commonality of all events has major implications as a kind of philanthropic manifesto in the generality of human experience, which Borges captures well:
The vociferous tragedies of the general order – fires, wars, epidemics – are a single pain, deceptively repeated on many screens.
Borges concludes by returning to the beginning, in the use of his argument and, arguably, in his entire body of work, himself: paradox. You write:
Anyway, and… Denying temporal order, denying identity, denying the astral space, is an open despair and a secret comfort. Our conclusion … is not frightening because it is not true; it's scary because it's irreversible and metal-clad. Time is something that can be done with. Time is a river that floods me, but I am a river; a tiger destroys me, but I am a tiger; it is the fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
The story, as everything is Labyrinthsreads oddly continuously; quoting, dissecting, and paraphrasing it here fails to honor the immediate sincerity of Borges's speech and the sheer joy of his focused prose. Fill it with Bertrand Russell for the nature of time, Virginia Woolf for its dramatic stretch, and Sarah Manguso for its confusing, comforting continuity.
