John Berger Review of Leaving the 21st Century

Shortly before John Berger died—a mere two days into the showtime of 2017—he had been working on a small volume about time. What Time Is It?the book'south title asked, and Berger, who had written and then evocatively almost how time feels different in different circumstances, was prepared for another entry in his list of brusque meditations on a bailiwick accompanied by illustrations.

Like Smoke, his musings on the unique, fading intimacies of smoking in a world attuned to the dangers thereof, or Cataract, a reflection on the vividness of colors before and after having his cataracts removed, this final project was meant to be a collaboration with his longtime friend, the Turkish artist Selçulk Demirel. Though Berger and Demirel had begun work on the projection the year before, it was left unfinished at Berger's death.

Information technology would accept been left unfinished, too, had it not been for Berger's Italian translator, Maria Nadotti, who vowed that Berger's project should be completed posthumously. A few weeks after his decease, Nadotti met with Demirel for dinner, where they agreed to push on with the book after all—but in a new style. Because the manuscript was missing text, Nadotti combed through Berger'due south work to find passages and quotations about time, arranging them aslope the oneiric illustrations in a style that resembled Berger'southward other pictorial collaborations with Demirel. For Nadotti, this project revealed something larger about Berger: that his own g theme, "his leitmotiv, is precisely 'Fourth dimension.'"

What Time Is It?examines the different means nosotros may think well-nigh what is on a chronometer: personal time, clock time, the way time bends and stretches and loop-de-loops for each of us in a unique way as we walk through the world, and how we are ever walking in the shadow of our own death, whether or not nosotros know information technology. Time in 1 identify for one person is not necessarily the same equally time for another, even if both may be measured by the same clock—and, of course, as Einstein famously observed, time is relative: clocks tick slightly differently, depending on how fast they are moving in space.

Virginia Woolf captured how Einsteinian relativity feels, in a literary context, in an extraordinary passage in her 1928 novel, Orlando, which features a gender-shifting protagonist who walks, scarcely aged, through centuries, for they historic period at a different rate from the ticks of the timepieces around them. This led Woolf to debate that each of united states, at the end of the 24-hour interval, walks not to the beat of one clock, simply to perhaps many shifting, rattling timepieces, some moving fast, some tiresome, because life-time feels so different—at present the button and pulse of a glowing building'south music, now the ho-hum reshaping of a desert's dunes, at present the rush of diving in a cloud of bubbles into a patch of rough foaming sea, or just that foreign indefinable sense of being in a nowadays moment we just recall of every bit now. In Orlando, she writes that

it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human being system and so that when eleven strikes, all the remainder chime in unison, and the present is neither a vehement disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-ii years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among united states; some are not all the same built-in though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years former though they call themselves thirty-six.

The best of us, Woolf, suggests, learn to keep our life-clocks in unison, so that, no matter if nosotros are river-running or stuck in the interminable slowness of an insomniac's dark, we will experience the same. Of course, this is not how most of united states live; ergo, Woolf says, some of u.s.a. accept lived out centuries, in life-time, while only registering 36 in human being years. Certain persons at 25 feel, already, like former, wizened souls, their inner worlds prematurely smoothed, like long-lost sea-drinking glass; and some septuagenarians feel the sculpted, scalloped youthfulness of someone in their early 30s.

And the truest fourth dimension of all, Berger might say—the time that we feel the most deeply—is the kind of fourth dimension nosotros tin can't measure out on a clock at all.

*

I've always had a soft spot for Berger'due south illustrated texts. They feel, to me, more than like illuminated manuscripts than picture books or illustrated stories. Different most illustrated narratives, Demirel'southward art doesn't serve to explain or bear witness a moment in the text; instead, the illustrations and Berger's text only coexist in an unexplained, charming relationship. Demirel's fine art is whimsical and ludically surreal, calling to heed the dreamlike atmospheres of Italo Calvino'southward fictions. They tell elliptical, almost aphoristic stories, less concerned with narrative than with conveying Berger's thoughts and feelings.

For Berger, a core departure between children and adults is how they experience time.

Despite their format, Berger and Demirel's collaborations experience distinct from about comics, graphic novels, or flick books. "Even when I was writing on art," Berger declared in 1984, "it was really a way of storytelling—storytellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people." These are puffs of story, clouds of narrative shifting, like soft blue smoke, into the nighttime, until they fade away.

This is true, too, of Berger'due south pictorial piece of work without Demirel, like his literary adaptation of his famous BBC testify on art, Ways of Seeing; his many studies of artists; or, perhaps his most magnificent of multimodal projects, A Fortunate Man, his moving, masterful collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, which served to capture the world of the dedicated, empathetic country doctor, John Sassall, through a blend of photographs and Berger's narrative.

What Time Is It?is a curious coda to Berger's relationship with Demirel. Its aim is larger than the book'due south brevity might suggest: to show that how we all experience time distinctly, filtering it through the curious alembics of ourselves, and that there is no one thing nosotros can properly telephone call time, but, instead, a multifarious set of experiences. And this, indeed, is one of Berger'southward great themes, the note he kept strumming.

In Smoke, for instance, Berger reflected, poignantly, on the way that smoking creates a special ellipsis in fourth dimension and space, when you lot take a suspension to smoke, or run across someone else who is doing the same, and this creates a little intermission in the globe, a pair of ashy parentheses that flicker like embers, then evanesce away when nosotros return, cigarettes out, to the stride the world nosotros'd briefly left behind. (Like Marjane Satrapi, who has also written a defence of smoking, Berger romanticized the cigarette-laden civilization he grew upward in; I partly understand what he means, having hung out with the smoker kids for years and grown to enjoy the peculiar sweetness of that bluish smoke and occasionally dark-kissing a cigarette myself in the by , but I besides believe Berger'south defense of smoking seems extremely, frustratingly naïve.)

In A Fortunate Man, too, one of Berger's key themes—aside from the complex relationships that a md has with their patients—is fourth dimension. "Information technology is a platitude," Berger observes, "that as we grow older time seems to pass more apace . . . But we seldom consider the reverse effect of the same procedure—the elongation of time as information technology must affect the young."

For Berger, a core difference between children and adults is how they experience fourth dimension. "If we knew how long a nighttime or a twenty-four hour period was to a child," he continued, "we might understand a great bargain more nearly babyhood." For children, he argued, time tends to move more slowly than for adults, partly because adults tend to be much more enlightened of the "absurdity" of events that may befall them; this sense of "helplessness" and "ache" in the face of such painful absurdity causes adults to experience time in a unique way.

The person "in anguish is trapped in the time-scale of childhood," he says, "without a child's protection, suffering a uniquely adult agony." "Adulthood is hell," Lovecraft famously wrote in a alphabetic character, and agreement the absurdity of this hellishness is what, perhaps, separates many adults from children.

When Sassall encounters a patient in ache, Berger continues, his patients' despairing questions "tend to present themselves to Sassall in terms of the experience of time. The elemental trouble becomes: What is the value of the moment? It is as though time became the equivalent of Conrad's sea: the sickness the equivalent of weather." To help his patients, Sassall must face time, because how he speaks to them can brand their future seem peaceful or painfully protracted. He must sculpt their sense of time to put them at ease—but also to make sure they sympathize the truth of their situations.

In Ways of Seeing, Berger also meditated on time, here through the importance of eras; for Berger, it was disquisitional to remember that nosotros view art in a particular period in time, which influences our assumptions and expectations. In innumerable other essays, too, Berger reflected on time, and What Time Is It?collects some of these ruminations. Prepare confronting Demirel's evocative illustrations, Berger's ideas about time take on new, curious meanings, even if the book ultimately feels a fleck chaotic in its organization.

Information technology's a pleasant deviation from reading most the politics of the world today—and the kind of divergence that, for those of the states with the privilege to be able to escape for a moment and read for fun, I think is essential to maintaining ourselves in a painful world. Escapism is both a privilege and a form of cocky-protection, self-care. I like floating away, when I can, to the afar seas and shores of something fun; it feels then hard to escape, nowadays, particularly with a dark-brown, queer trunk many lawmakers seem to wish did not exist, merely when I tin canescape, even for a few moments, it feels so lovely and salvific.

*

Whether or not any time can be measured at all—or if time even exists—is another question. What time is, on a cardinal level, is difficult to grasp. In that location are essentially 3 schools of thought that, however today, remain somewhat in contention. One of schoolhouse of thought argues that time can't really exist measured on a clock, because what matters is how information technology feels to us, and that experience itself goes beyond scientific measurements; another schoolhouse argues that fourth dimension exists, and can always be measured; and the concluding school of thought argues that time is but a user-friendly play a trick on of our mind.

In all of these schools of thought, though, time and motility are braided together. If we can movement, we must be moving in time; if nosotros cannot move, and at that place is nothing changing in any sense, time is not present in any discernible way. This was what paralyzed Zeno of Elea in his infamous paradoxes in the fifth century B.C.Due east, when he declared that it was essentially impossible to move at all, because the distance from point A to indicate B—whatever two points in space—independent an infinity of numbers.

Zeno assumed that space and fourth dimension could be divided infinitely, meaning that to go from ane point to another, you essentially had to cross an infinite distance. If someone wished to walk lx anxiety, for instance, they would kickoff take to walk 30 feet, and so 15 anxiety, then 7.five feet, and so on, and and then on, with the numbers subdividing forever. This makes doing annihilation seem inconceivable; how can one walk an infinity of steps to get beyond a room?

Information technology was impossible, so, he proclaimed, to move any altitude at all. Motion was an illusion, he said, echoing the conclusion of his mentor, Parmenides. Absurd as Zeno's paradoxes may seem (and many mathematicians agree that calculus provides a compelling, if complex, solution to the paradoxes), it was an early on example of just how tightly time and movement are linked.

Einstein maintained that time, speed, and movement were linked, only he went farther in this regard than anyone else had, upending a commonplace fault nosotros frequently casually make nearly the nature of the earth. Moving very fast meant that fourth dimension, for us, would move slower in relation to someone moving less fast than us—an experiment-verified phenomenon known in physics as time dilation. We run across this clearly in the paradox of the twins, a famous curiosity that emerged from studying the consequences of Einstein'southward theory of relativity pushed to their limits.

The paradox declared that two identical twin boys would age differently if one of them was consistently traveling at a high speed. If 1 boy stayed on Earth and some other zoomed off in a high-velocity rocket, the boy on the fast-moving rocket would seem to historic period slower than the other boy, simply because time was slowing down for him relative to time for the slower-moving twin. When the boys reunited after a menses of fourth dimension, one of the twins, therefore, would be younger than the other, despite the same amount of time supposedly having passed.

For Henri Bergson, whose temporal views remind me vaguely of Berger'southward, these ideas got everything wrong. Our experience of time, he wrote and lectured to packed auditoriums at the acme of his career as 1 of Europe and America's about popular thinkers in the early on 20th century, was immeasurable; time, at core, could be reduced to what Bergson called durée or duration, a deep, unbroken experience that transcended scientific measurement.

For Einstein—who debated Bergson in 1925 and claimed, in a move that arguably led to the demise of the then-immensely-popular Bergson'due south career, that Bergson did non empathize the theory of relativity well enough to debate him—fourth dimension was not linear, just, instead, moved relative to 1'due south speed and position in space, meaning that a lightning strike viewed from a rushing railroad train might seem to striking slightly differently than if i saw that same strike from a stationary position at a station.

Time is tough to pin down, peculiarly in a language so predicated upon its presence, where our verb tenses suggest past, present, and future.

In 1908, the philosopher J. Yard. E. McTaggart went and then far as to fence that fourth dimension does non fifty-fifty really exist, in an boggling essay entitled, fittingly, "The Unreality of Time." Change, McTaggart said, was the essence of time; without change, there is no time. But no manner of presenting time—exist it equally events occurring in the past, present, or future (what he called the "A-serial" of time), or events being labeled earlier versus later (the "B-serial" of time)—actually shows change, considering these temporal relationships never actually shift. (1900, for instance, is ever"before" than 1905.)

Beyond this, for McTaggart, it was contradictory to claim that an upshot could be by, nowadays, or future for instance, information technology was absurd to say that, for instance, a presidential election ispresent, has been past, and will befuture, as it cannot be all these things at once. Defending this idea of time, he claimed, led to a round argument, because one tin only define the past, present, and future by assuming these exist in the starting time identify.

Time, in brusk, was a mess of contradictions; we imagined that time existed, only information technology was actually an illogical construct when examined more closely. McTaggart's views themselves have flaws, just nonetheless present a curious, interesting attack on 1 of the most primal things in well-nigh people's experience of life.

McTaggart was far from the last to claim that fourth dimension was not real. In his knowingly titled book The End of Fourth dimension (1999), the theoretical theorist Julian Barbour argued—with the smile of a confident funambulist—that we just live in a constant present, with no past or hereafter, meaning that nosotros are, in a sense, simultaneously alive and expressionless all at one time. This constant present he calls "the Now."

"If you lot try to get your easily on time," he told Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, in About Time, "it's e'er slipping through your fingers. People are sure time is in that location, but they can't get concord of information technology. My feeling is that they can't go agree of it because it isn't there at all." Our sense of time passing is fiddling more a yard, convenient illusion. If nosotros are e'er, inextricably located in the now, at that place is no such thing, actually, every bit past or hereafter. The idea is as charming every bit it is disarming.

Time is tough to pin down, especially in a language so predicated upon its presence, where our verb tenses suggest past, present, and time to come. This is particularly problematic when people ask such nonsensical questions every bit what happened "before" the offset of the universe, when time itself, in theory, came into being; there can't be a "before" if time starts with the universe'due south formation. Our spoken communication cannot fully capture the nuances of the near confusing aspects of time.

What, after all, is the linguistic communication of a clock?

*

Berger's volume may feel slight. It will not teach u.s.a. annihilation, actually, about the science of how time may work. Its lack of new writing is disappointing. If you enter the book expecting a coherent guide to time, like little letters from a more scientific Screwtape to Wormwood, you volition feel cheated.

But this isn't the book'south indicate. Information technology seeks, instead, to demonstrate something essential to comprehending Berger himself, which is the peculiar, protean nature of fourth dimension in his writing. Berger was obsessed with time and his own mortality, and What Time is Information technology?is a attestation to how we cannot read Berger without thinking most time. His insights are sometimes amazing and cryptic, designed to be reread and re-pondered over the course of our life.

"Those who read or heed to our stories see everything equally through a lens," he wrote in one of my favorite passages. "This lens is the clandestine of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. If nosotros storytellers are Death'southward Secretaries, nosotros are so because, in our brief mortal lives, nosotros are grinders of these lenses."

Death, always, is our boss, looming over those lenses we grind so that we may tell, in the candle-flicker of time we have, our stories. Berger'south braiding of death, storytelling, and time hither is typical, as blunt and fell every bit it is beautiful.

We may never fully demystify the enigma of time, only if we can capture, like Berger, how information technology feels, perhaps, in the end, that'south all we demand. Learning how we perceive and process time, afterwards all, is to understand i of the nearly inescapable, if elusive, aspects of beingness homo.

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