An illness and a joy

The reality (however relative) and nature of time appear inexorable and inescapable. One way to cope with this fact is to tell others and share with them our thoughts, feelings and stories – a bit like unity in the face of a common enemy.

“For whom am I writing this?” wonders eighty-two year old Iris Chase Griffen in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. “For myself? I think not. I have no picture of myself reading it over at a later time, later time having become problematical. For some stranger, in the future, after I’m dead? I have no such ambition, no such hope.”[i] Many of us are afflicted by this bug for writing – writing in some form or the other, dashing off letters, composing something creative and, if nothing else, at least keeping diaries and journals. George Orwell thought that there were four great motives for writing and they are to be found to different degrees in every writer. We were firstly driven to write by “sheer egoism”, a “desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death.”[ii] Some wrote when they perceived beauty in the external world or “in words and their right arrangement”. There was also the “historical impulse,” a wish to identify truths from the past and store them for posterity. Lastly, there was “political purpose,” to aspire to push the world in a certain direction.

Leonello Spada, St Jerome, 1610.

Not everyone can write as well as Orwell. Nor can all claim to have the ennobling and lofty motives he identified. Given that, are we at times deluding ourselves with false grandeur? Or is it simply a case of hypergraphia – a temporal lobe disorder that triggers an uncontrollable craving to write? It appears that hypergraphia may – among other causes - compel one to keep huge journals or jot off frequent letters to newspaper and magazine editors. (There must surely be a lot of editors who can attest to having been prey to this onslaught!) However, considering the rate at which we have been identifying (going at least by reports in the media) putative genes for every single human condition – writing, like a lot of our urges and passions, could well be due to some cerebral or physiological shortcoming. This, perversely, could be our saving grace too: for, the one telling difference between hypergraphia and some other condition that fosters the desire to write is that in the latter case the final output is usually, and sometimes disappointingly, a mere trickle. Hence, the latter could be a case more of parched inspiration rather than diseased brains.

However, aspiring to be the next Orwell does not always have to be the sole reason for us to write – and presumably not every one of us is afflicted by hypergraphia either. For most, the overwhelming driver seems to be to pause the clock: we wish the “horses of the night” would “run slowly, slowly” as Ovid implored. When someone gets close to death, he will – as the Czech poet Miroslav Holub observes in his poem, “Metaphysics” – start collecting things, such as beer coasters from bars “by which he achieves some immortality, the only kind that's really intelligible.”[iii] It is as if we are compelled to leave behind these fossils for a future palaeontologist to pore over and decipher what made us tick. Atwood’s Iris thinks that we want to “memorialize ourselves… and assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.” We do this because “at the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.”[iv]

Umberto Eco expressed the same fear of the eventual silence and final darkness when he observed, “What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away… We remedy the sadness by working. For example, by writing…”[v]

Our voices will fall silent when time stops forever for us. It appears that we invented time when we acquired cognition and intelligence and became aware of the beauty and pleasures around us and, more importantly, gained the realisation that one day we will have to leave all this behind us. We meanwhile try to comprehend temporality by attributing some familiar quanta of events to the past and hope there is a lot more of such events to come. Animals on the other hand do not seem to have a need for a concept called time as they live in the here and now. We humans have instead become slave to a creature of our own making.

Some scientists and philosophers contend that we do not have to be so worried about the erosion of time for after all time is an illusion. The arrow of time – and time’s supposed travel only towards the future – is an effect of the second law of thermodynamics which imprints on the world “a conspicuous asymmetry between past and future directions along the time axis…. and talk of past or future is as meaningless as referring to up or down,” as explained in a recent Scientific American article.[vi] It is also conted that time emerges “from some timeless stuff that brings itself to order,” just as life emerges from lifeless molecules.[vii] In Hindu philosophy, Advaita Vedanta teaches that Brahma, the Absolute, is timeless, eternal with no before and after. The Bhagavad Gita explains that when necessary God appears on Earth “as Time, the waster of the peoples”.[viii] Consequently, the temporal, though real within human experience, has no ultimate reality. As the Psalm says, “for a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”[ix]

Nevertheless, the only idea of time I am intuitively wary of - and intrinsically conscious of is the finite nature of my time. Classical science may claim that natural processes are reversible but I have not witnessed a broken glass re-morphing into a full one. At a moment of immutable loss – such as the death of someone close to me - science and philosophy fail to console me. Time, for me, always flows forward. (It may occasionally appear to stand still when the cline of time seemingly takes a breather when moments of extreme stress, horror or sorrow assail me.) The past does not prepare me for such moments when I have torn my moorings and am adrift. The future too is a blank as I have seemingly lost all my maps and signposts. Hence, the time I feel in my bones either flows forward or stands still – but never backwards.

The reality (however relative) and nature of time appear inexorable and inescapable. One way to cope with this fact is to tell others and share with them our thoughts, feelings and stories – a bit like unity in the face of a common enemy. Our writing may not always be assured of being eloquent, praiseworthy or beautiful; even the very process could moreover be enervating too. As essayist and literary critic Simon Leys notes, writing is something that “can be a compulsion, an art, an illness, a therapy, a joy, a mania, a blessing, a madness, a curse, a passion, and many other things besides.”[x] When we apply all these adjectives to life too we realise that writing could be a metaphor for the entirety of life itself.

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[i] Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, Bloomsbury, 2000, p. 43.

[ii] George Orwell, “Why I write”, http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

[iii] Miroslav Holub, Metaphysics, trans: David Young,

 Grand Street, No. 52, Games (Spring, 1995), p. 60

[iv] Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, Bloomsbury, 2000, p. 95.

[v] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/27/society.umbertoeco

[vi] Scientific American Editors (2012-11-30). A Question of Time: The Ultimate Paradox (Kindle Locations 260-264). Scientific American. Kindle Edition.

[vii] Scientific American Editors (2012-11-30). A Question of Time: The Ultimate Paradox (Kindle Locations 2531-2540). Scientific American. Kindle Edition.

[viii] Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy,HarperPerennial, 1945, p.191.

[ix] Psalm 90:4.

[x] Simon Leys, “The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays”, New York Review Books, 2011, p. 267.