Space is illusory and time deceitful

‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.’

‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.’ Well I do; more and more, as becomes someone of my age, for as Dr Johnson said, ‘At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.’ Space is fiendishly difficult. I get lost in the intricacies of String Theory and the debate about whether there are nine dimensions or ten. Much easier to believe in miracles. I recently heard the great Oxford mathematician Sir Roger Penrose produce a new theory of the Big Bang, which he sees as a self-perpetuating and repetitive event, punctuated of course by intervals of billions of years. Thanks to a lot of ingenious diagrams on which he had lavished immense trouble, I just about grasped his argument at the time, but it has since vanished from my head, like the entire central philosophy of Heidegger, which I once understood.

But at least with space, visualisation (and so diagrams) is possible. Not so with time. It is entirely abstract and can be seen only through metaphors. It attracts them like a gigantic literary magnet. Shakespeare was obviously obsessed by time. It is the ‘bald sexton’, the ‘cormorant devouring’, the ‘clock-setter’. It is ‘envious and calumniating’, a ‘chronicle of wasted time’. Time is ‘injurious’, marching ‘with a robber’s haste’, or making ‘thievish progress’. It has a ‘fell hand’, and deals in ‘whips and scorns’. It is the transfixer, dispensing ‘saltness’. It ‘wastes’ and kills and, in its turn, has to be killed. It is the ‘old common arbitrator’, a ‘wallet’ containing ‘alms for oblivion’, a ‘bank or shoal’, from which to ‘jump the life to come’.