Time is a circle tenderly wrapped around eternity.
What an amazing revelation to tumble out of the penumbral light! No doubt here; follow the gripping invitation to dive deeper into “the oblique crevices and corners where the mystery continues to dwell, glimmering in fugitive light”.[1]
Only, how can I be equal to the invitation?
I shall become an attentive meteorologist of the inner landscape tracking the seasons of the heart. I shall chart the tides of life fluctuating in the sunny breezes and dark storms. I shall cruise the waves of light flexing and arching to meet the graceful dance of the waxing and waning moon chasing the sun.
I shall become a historian studying the way humanity has sliced up time to shape calendars, both secular and religious, and named the segments: days of the week recalling figures of Norse mythology; months conjuring Roman emperors who continue to travel through time in our imagination.
I shall study the line drawn in the sand of time to mark an epoch-making threshold divorcing after from before.
I shall appreciate how religious celebrations follow both the solar or lunar cycles and build on humanity’s inheritance so that no ceremony is forgotten and everything once celebrated is included. I shall be in awe when, miraculously, religious calendars momentarily align, as is the case this year, when the Christian Lent and the Muslim Ramadan started on the same day, the 18th of February.
All these diligent observations got me thinking about time and our ambivalent relationship to the god Chronos. What would happen if we were to discard the measures of time seared into our human experience? What might occur if we jumped ahead of the paradigmatic curvature of spacetime? Would we experience an existential demise, a quantum leap or a radical transformation of consciousness? These are metaphysical questions that have fascinated humans since we first started to harness the transient nature of time.
If we are so blessed, we catch glimpses of the timeless, fleeting light when we give ourselves to deep silent meditation or centering prayer in the stillness of a cloistered environment. Fortunately, no need to commit to advanced spiritual practices; it is also available in the ordinariness of tending to mundane tasks with a loving heart or when we read poetry or listen to great music floating away to the wild landscapes of imagination. Contemplative activities draw on objectless awareness and offer wonderful entry points for metaphysical explorations. But what if we were to consciously take this further so as to imagine a life completely out of time, be it linear or circular.
This is precisely what Solvej Balle, a Danish author, has done in a seven-volume series entitled On the Calculation of Volume. The storyline is simple: Tara Selter, the heroine, has involuntarily fallen out of time and she is endlessly reliving the eighteenth of November. We follow her bewilderment when faced with this new reality that she slowly deciphers on her own terms with the hope of finding her way back into linear time. We feel the utter loneliness that ensues from jumping off the train of time, the desperate need to understand the new spacetime curvature, the drive to bring order to the subsequent disorder and grapple around for navigational bearings only to reluctantly let go of them.
It is a great fictional piece that surreptitiously becomes a fundamental philosophical essay. I won’t say more so as not to spoil your own experience should you choose to pick up a volume. To date, six volumes have been published in Danish, three in English in an excellent translation, with the forth on its way.
It is mind-blowing storytelling. Interestingly, it is not a dystopia even if there are, at times, shades of despair. My experience so far is that it is full of hope and possibilities, blessings and challenges. Maybe falling out of time is the ultimate desert experience, the possibility to do a complete reset.
Because matters of time and space, eternity and infinity cannot be addressed with direct questions that only echo back our sense of loneliness and separateness, we need to put our ears and eyes down to the ground of the human experience in an oblique way. We need to draw on the power of imagination encapsulated in poetry and threaded in fiction to observe afresh our experience, expand our attention and mature our awareness. On the Calculation of Volume is a very powerful read for the curious, courageous and compassionate souls exploring the limits of intelligibility of the universe and the ever-unfolding human experience.
I therefore invite you to slip into the wafer-thin space between the circle of time and the point of nothingness of eternity. What might we find there?
References
[1] John O’Donohue For Light from Benedictus. A Book of Blessings (Bantam Press, 2007), p. 34