Art and science of time

"When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second," Albert Einstein said, explaining relativity. "When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour."

Such a notion resonates throughout Eva Hoffman's slender reflection on the chronological conundrum, Time. At the heart of her book is the idea that time is what we make it, that it is not just fluid but impossible to pin down.

"Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," she notes, quoting Nabokov, yet all the same, she continues, "We live in time." How we reconcile those two opposing visions — the abstract and the concrete, the cosmic and the quotidian — says a lot about who we are, not just as individuals but as members of a species that has never fully come to grips with evanescence, with the discomforting reality that, in the flicker of an instant, each of us will be gone.

By turns meditation and social commentary, essay and observation, Time is a work that, like its subject, is difficult to categorise. Hoffman deftly dramatises the essential contradiction: How do we find meaning in what doesn't last? "It is to cope with what time takes away from us," she writes, "and what it devours, that humankind's first philosophies — its religions and myths — created alternative temporal topographies of eternity and the afterlife."

But for all that these topographies once offered solace, implicit in her thesis is that they no longer do. Instead, we have the twin mythologies of art and science: On the one hand, a writer such as Samuel Beckett, whose "allegories of existence as nothing but time passing may be quintessential, if bleak, representations of time," and on the other, "the ruthless laws of evolution," by which "species exist not for the sake of individuals but in order to perpetuate themselves". Such ideologies might appear in opposition, yet Hoffman finds a balance that makes sense. If making sense of our days is ultimately what time — and Time — is about, we face new challenges amid the acceleration of contemporary life, where "speed becomes its own self-justifying value".

Hoffman considers where this leaves us: "If we do not want to live meaninglessly," she suggests, "then we need to give ourselves over sometimes to the time of inwardness and contemplation, to empathy and aesthetic wonder." She is right, for without that stillness, that reflection, we lose a key component of our humanity. It may be true that we live in time but time lives within us also. We define it, for ourselves and for our culture; we decide to what we want to turn our minds. That, I suppose, makes for another kind of relativity, regardless of whether we find meaning in the moment or choose to live unreconciled.