Everybody talks about time all the time: There's never enough time. It's high time she realized that. I'm sorry, but you're out of time. You should have thought of that a long time ago. Is it in real time or slow motion? I have jet lag. Just in the nick of time. Or I have to kill time. Time marches on. It's a thing of timeless beauty. Time is money. Time and tide wait for no man. Time, it often seems, is the central problem in a person's life. But who really reflects on the nature of time? Who asks the questions of the great Gauguin painting of youth, maturity and age in Tahiti: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"
Christopher Dewdney does. He writes about time with the agility and insight of the poet he is, and with the clear exposition of an engaging and passionate teacher. Early on in The Soul of the World, he lays out the two poles of his exploration. One is represented by the psychologist William James, who noted that we cannot grasp the present moment, that it is "gone in the instant of becoming." (In this, he is close to Augustine and the whole Christian tradition, for which "now" is regarded as not in time at all.) The other is represented by the painter Paul Cézanne, who believed it was his task capture the moment as it passed. "Capture its reality in paint!" he wrote. "To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become the moment."
Soul of the World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time
, by Christopher Dewdney, HarperCollins, 243 pages, $29.95
Dewdney embodies Cézanne's quest by framing the whole book in one passing year of the writer's life. True, the meat of each chapter lays out in stimulating detail the study of time. In one, for example, he leads us from the origin of the seven-day week to the invention of the clock to the parsing of time into seconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds, femtoseconds and attoseconds. (The last, by the way, represents a billionth of a billionth of a second. ) In another, he looks at our increasing ability to manipulate and recapitulate time, beginning with Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of a galloping horse. But shot through each chapter are the writer's own memories and his efforts to fix a moment in time.
It may well be that Dewdney himself intended his poetic descriptions and reflections to serve as examples of the ideas he explores, but the examples outrun the theories. He notices that in her last days, his mother continually looked toward the clock at her bedside. He remembers how his father - archeologist and natural historian Selwyn Dewdney - helped him not to fear thunderstorms by teaching him to count the beats between the sound and the flash. He sees how time appeared to slow in the moment of a streetcar accident when he realized a collision was inevitable. He describes the changes in the light in the sky and in the plants and trees in his garden as they pass through the seasons of the year, from winter to winter. He evokes the way that time seems to stand still in the liminal moment of sunset. He does this often enough to remind me that almost everyone who goes on a trip comes back with pictures of sunsets. Why?
