Experiencing Time - Excerpts from 'The Magic Mountain'
Living in the times of a pandemic is no longer a phase we have to simply wait over, rather, as we become accustomed to the circumstances prevailing, we’re now moving towards an equilibrium where such living becomes embedded in our psyche permanently, and consequently, becomes a permanent way of life. (Though surely, we are still in the infant stages of such a maturation and the future is ever uncertain)
In these state of affairs, an experiment of nature on us one might conceive, we can approach this discontinuity as a tool for a more abstract unity, of what remains unchanged in our mode of living, which are in the domain of philosophical speculation. Indeed, these events make philosophical abstraction easier with empirical validity, and the philosophical concept of interest, of which there has been a definite empirical discontinuity, but at the same time within the chain of the broader philosophical continuity is how we experience time.
Like most of us, the initial stages of pandemic living threw me off-balance, and in response I sought some refuge in escapist fictional literature; particularly Thomas Mann’s – The Magic Mountain , which had been glaring at me from the bookshelf for two years.
I deem even a brief plot summary to be irrelevant in the scope of this essay, for what I am to discuss deals with a few excerpts from the book discussing the notion of Time and Duration, which provoked my fascination in both applying the Philosophy of Henri Bergson; and being relevant to the state of affairs we have found ourselves in.
A Dialogue
The protagonist’s temperature is being taken, taking around seven minutes.(P and D are the Protagonist and Deuteragonist here, respectively.)
P
’Seven minutes! But they must be up!’
D
‘Yes, but when you watch it, the time, it goes very slowly. I quite like the measuring, four times a day; for then you know what a minute – or seven of them- actually amounts to up here in this place, where the seven days of the week whisk by the way they do!’
P:
‘You say “actually”, but time isn’t actual. When it seems long to you, then it is long; when it seems short, why, then it is short. But how long or how short it actually is, that nobody knows.
D:
‘How so? – we do measure it. We have watches and calendars for this purpose; and when a month is up, why, then up it is, for you and for me, and for all of us.’
P:
A minute is then as long as it seems to you when you measure yourself?’
D:
A minute is as long it lasts as long – as it takes the second hand of my watch to complete a circuit.’
P:
‘But it takes a varied length of time for our senses. It is motion, isn’t it, motion in space?
We measure time by space.
How is that better than measuring space by time?
Hamburg to Davos is twenty hours – that is, by train.
On foot, how long is it? And in the mind, how long? Not a second.
What is time?
Space we perceive with our organs, senses of sight and touch.Good.
But where is the organ of time?
How can we measure something about which we know nothing?
We say that ‘Time passes’. Sure, let it pass.
But how does one measure that?
We believe time flows evenly, with scientific precision, but does it? As far as our consciousness is considered, it does not – We only assume it does, for the sake of convenience; and our units of measurement are purely arbitrary, sheer conventions…’
Excursus on the Sense of Time
There is after all , something peculiar about the process of habituating oneself in a new place, the often laborious fitting in and getting used to, which one undertakes for its own sake, and of set purpose to break it all off as soon as it is complete, or not long thereafter, and to return to one’s former state.
It is an interval, an interlude, inserted with the object of recreation, into the tenor of life’s main concerns; its purpose the relief of the organism, which is perpetually busy at its task of self-renewal, and which was in danger, almost in process, of being vitiated, slowed down, relaxed, by the bald, unjointed monotony of its daily course.
But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long at a time? It is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case then complete rest would be the best restorative. It is rather something psychical; It means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the perception of time, so closely bound up with the consciousness of life that one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment.
Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium. In general, it is thought that the interestingness and novelty of the time-content are what ‘make the time pass’; that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow.
This is only true with reservations. Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all.
And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hour and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow far more slowly than those poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone. Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of time consequent upon monotony.
Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.
Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself.
Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene, of all our sojourns at cures and bathing resorts; it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident.
Our first days in a new place; time has a youthful, that is to say, a broad and a sweeping, flow, persisting for some six to eight days. Then, as one ‘gets used to the place’, a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt. He who clings or, better expressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps, is uncannily fugitive and fleet.
On the other hand, the quickening of the sense of time will flow out beyond the interval and reassert itself after the return to ordinary existence: the first days at home after the holiday will be lived with broader flow, freshly and youthfully – but only the first few, for one adjusts oneself more quickly to the rule than to the exception; and if the sense of time be already weakened by age, or – and this is a low sign of vitality – it was never really well developed, one drowses quickly back into the old life, and after four-and-twenty hours it is as though one had never been away, and the journey had been but a watch in the night.