Swiping Time

Swiping Time

   My wife and I just finished watching the movie Lucy starring Scarlett Johansson, a sci-fi sort of film that speculates what might happen if we used the entirety of our brain vs. the ballyhooed 10% (and I use those terms because most of today's scientific world dispels the 10% usage as a myth, even if a suspected large portion of our brain is simply used for storage and connections unknown).  What was interesting in the movie, however, was Lucy (the main character's name) says that our imagery of ones and zeros is wrong (albeit, the only concept we can comprehend), and that the only connecting factor holding life together is...time.  And to illustrate this, Lucy uses her newfound ability to stop and reverse time, to scan history in seconds, to see where we --and life-- all began.  If an organism can't become immortal, the scientist in the movie says, then it will seek its only other option which is to reproduce.

   This premise of getting it wrong (that is, dealing in finite concepts, ones and twos, beginnings and endings) was brought up in another film, Prometheus, which said that the only thing "immortal" in our world, the only true thing that has lasted through dinosaurs and bacteria and humans and plants is not time, but DNA (in the movie, DNA seeks only a carrier, doesn't matter what form, to continue its species).  And as Lucy swipes backward through time, one watching history fly by, our brief blip of being here truly becomes nothing but a blip.

   So it was odd as I began reading (finally) And Man Created God by Selina O'Grady, that this passage of time was exemplified in her book's opening graphs, the first showing the world as it was known during the time of Jesus.  I had heard of the Germanic Roman Empire and the Han Empire; but (to test you history majors), the equally large Kushan Empire and the Parthian (Arsacid) Empire, as well as the smaller (but still quite large) kindoms of Axum and Meroe?  And as for the Roman Empire, a brief ascension history would be Augustus (great-nephew of Julius Ceasar) being followed by his stepson, Tiberius, who is followed by his nephew, Caligula, who is assassinated and his uncle, Claudius, takes over, but gives way to his stepson, Nero who commits suicide...and on and on until yes, the Roman Empire splits into Western and Eastern Empires some 300 years later.  Phew...

   This swirl through our history, that of humankind, at least, was refreshing and depressing at the same time.  So many huge empires, each thinking that they were there for the duration, that they had too many people, that they were too strong, that theirs was an empire without equal.  And yet, like Lucy swiping time away, just like that they were gone, even from memory.  Meroe, Axum, Gandhara, Mauryan...hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions, simply gone with a swipe.

   Comedian Lewis Black mentions that to someone who's 20, someone 60 seems old.  But now that his parents are 90 (and he's 60), he's still a kid.  After all, it's his mother, or as he says, "my mother, for crying out loud."  My own mother is nearing 90 (yes, I'm still a kid in her eyes as well), and some of my friends are lucky to also still have their mother (one friend's mother is 97).  Other friends of mine haven't been quite so fortunate, their mothers now passed as if entering their 90s was a perilous time, crossing and slipping on the rapids of life.

   The concept of time is debatable among physicists, merely something that we humans have created as a concept, much as author Selina O'Grady writes that we have created god as a concept, something we can comprehend.  Yet this is us now, what we know, what we grew up with.  And for right now at least, time is precious as I've written before, even if we do seem to waste quite a bit of it.  Like an empire, we see a few threats here and there but nothing that appears strong enough to take us down, to break this routine, to disrupt how we've gone about day after day.  And yet someday, we recognize that we will indeed be that person watching that time slip away, wondering how it all went so quickly, how a day and a season and a year could have become so difficult to remember, how decades could  be swept into a description of only a few seconds...my 30s were fun but my 40s, oh my 40s.  And that, as they say, is that.

   In my next posting, I'll talk more of this.  But I do believe that's the doorbell which means that my pizza is here, and my book is growing more and more interesting, and after all, tempus fugit.  Ah yes, another day...nothing changes.