‘The lie of time’
So says Stephen, Richard Osman’s fictional character who has been living with Alzheimer’s for quite some time, in Osman’s series of thrillers featuring the Thursday Murder Club. In the fourth book in this series – The last devil to die – Stephen is reminiscing with his wife (chapter 60 pages 291-292) on his long life and expresses frustration that time as we understand it has let him down:
‘We’ve got time all wrong …. We think time travels forward, marches on in a straight line, and so we hurry alongside it to keep up. Hurry, hurry, mustn’t fall behind. But it doesn’t, you see. Time just swirls around us. Everything is always present. The things you’ve done, the people you’ve loved, the people we’ve hurt, they’re still there.’
Richard Osman is capturing the developing theories of physics that time as a continuum process with a past, present and future is an illusion. Our life is not a length of string that we can divide into what has gone and what is and what may yet to happen, a beginning, a long middle part, and an end.
Is time an illusion? It seems that theoretical physicists are more and more inclined towards the idea that time as conceived by the human mind is just that, an illusion, which is essential to our understanding of our very existence.
‘Without a sense of time, leading us from cradle to grave, our lives would make little sense’
So says Miriam Frankel, writing in The Conversation on 08/03/2023 – Great Mysteries of Physics 1: is time an illusion? (theconversation.com)
Our life, in the end, is a collection of experiences, which are sequential as our chronological years add year-on-year to a sum of memories. But memories deceive us as they vie for front row seat when we try to bring them to the front of our temporal lobe from the hippocampus, the memory bank in our brain.
Some of our memories are stronger in their vividity maybe because there are moments in our life that are so powerful and make such an impact on our very being that they imprint themselves on our brain, literally. Other experiences are ‘parked’ for another time to think about. That other opportunity maybe never present itself again, so we ‘forget’ them. When we try to recapture them, the thread of that experience is just too weak and too threadbare to grasp.
Is that what happens to the brain devastated by diseases that affect retrieval of memories?
Stephen in Osman’s novel expresses this succinctly:
‘My memories are like emeralds, clear and bright and true, but every new day crumbles like sand, and I can’t get hold of it at all.’
As he nears the end of his life, Stephen appears to conclude that his life, maybe, is a collage of events that has occurred concurrently, in the same ‘spacetime’ as it does in our universe:
‘It has shown me the lie of the thing …. The lie of time. Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been is present in the same place. But we still think the thing that has just happened, or is about to happen, we think that’s the most important thing.’