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A fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing.
But it is inevitable that a professional playwright, especially a great one, should be preoccupied by time. ‘A week,’ said Harold Wilson, ‘is a long time in politics.’ ‘Maybe,’ was J.B. Priestley’s rejoinder, ‘but on stage five seconds can be an eternity.’ Some of Shakespeare’s key scenes last barely a minute. Then there is the whole knife-edge business of ‘timing’, especially in comedy. This was something that great comic Ronald Reagan understood: when delivering one of his one-liners, a micro-second made all the difference. Mark Twain, in his valuable essay ‘How to Tell a Story’, rates timing first, as for instance in his notorious negro shocker, ‘The Golden Arm’. If you got the timing of the ‘snapper’ exactly right, he said, you could have teenage girls literally jumping out of their seats.
Yes, you say, we all know time is important, but what is it? Philosophers have devoted far too little attention to this problem. Since the time of Parmenides and Zeno, a school of thought has maintained what is called a ‘static’ view of time. The distinction between past and future, according to this view, is subjective, based on our own experience, rather than reflecting a real and objective ontological divide. Since Einstein demonstrated his special theory of relativity, this static view of time appears to be backed by physics. Now that radio telescopes allow us to penetrate deep into space — almost beyond the limits of our imagination — the time that light takes to travel enables us to see events which took place millions, even billions, of years ago. We will soon peer so far into space that we will see bits of the action that occurred very soon after the Big Bang itself. That is ‘then’, with a vengeance. But it is ‘now’ to us.
What if we go even further and see so far that we are in a period in space-time even before the Big Bang? What would appear on our telescope? A blank? Probably, because the likelihood is that the Big Bang brought time (as well as space) into existence. Only with the creation of the universe — by God or mysterious physical events — did the clock begin to tick, and when the universe ends, ‘time …must have a stop’ (Shakespeare again). Of course if Professor Penrose is right, what the radio telescopes will show us just before the Big Bang is the extreme form of entropy which led to it in the first place. And if you don’t know, and want to know, what entropy is, you will find that, in looking it up in a dictionary, you will emerge none the wiser. It is one of those slippery words which no one has yet defined satisfactorily. Some scientists have it clear in their minds (they think) but cannot put it into precise words. The concept was invented by Clausius in 1865 to signify the transformation contents of a system, from the German Verwandlungsinhalt. Three years later another scientist used it in exactly the opposite sense. Entropy is created by unusable energy and the entropy of the universe tends to zero. The best metaphorical illustration is provided by a character called Boyle in O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock: ‘The whole world’s in a terrible state of chassis.’
Entropy can only occur in time, but extreme chaos brings time to a stop. What starts it again — perfect order? Time is not, perhaps, the most mysterious thing in the universe but it is certainly one of them. Thinking about it reminds me of horrible old Haldane’s saying: ‘Reality is not only stranger than we suppose but stranger than we can suppose.’ First Heraclitus then Aristotle posited a dynamic, as opposed to a static, view of time in which the past is real and absolute and the present is real but the future becomes real only when it moves into the present. Most people take this view.
However, some people now argue that, as a result of relativity, it is necessary to distinguish between ‘historical’ or external or absolute time and the ‘personal’ time of an individual. There would be nothing illogical, it is said, in a time-traveller going backwards in time 1,000 years while himself only ageing one day in the process. This does not mean, these theorists add, that a time-traveller can alter the past, since if he could he might go back and murder his own great-grandfather, and thus, in theory, make it impossible for himself to exist.
However, I would argue that all of us are time-travellers into the past (not into the future) and that we not only visit the past but alter it. And our time-machine is memory. The trouble with memory is that it not only has lacunae; it also makes imaginative additions to the record, or mysterious and inexplicable changes. The other week, in the letters column of The Spectator, a railway anorak corrected my statement that in the 1930s the colour of LNER trains was yellow. He says they were green. Now it may be that in a historical sense he is right, that it is a matter of record that this pre-war rail network had a green livery. But I can see, in my mind’s eye (Shakespeare again), a yellow engine with LNER on it as plainly as I can now see, across the road from my library as I write this, the pale mauve of a magnolia tree. That is the past, as I recall it. I should add that another reader writes to me that the colour was certainly blue. And so it is, or was, for him. As a historian I know from many instances that eye-witnesses to events, recalling them after many years, describe them quite differently but with passionate insistence on the truth of their conflicting versions. Any policeman can give you instances of witnesses giving radically different versions of events after only a few hours. Memory is not so much a window into the past as a distorting mirror. And time is an enigma.
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