On this week’s Desert Island Discs Simon McBurney told the story of the chunk of stratification which hung on the wall of his archaeologist father’s study, which imbued the young Simon with the sense that Time is to be measured vertically rather than horizontally.
This raises intriguing speculations about what would happen if scientists, economists, & others who use statistical time series models, were to switch around the normal practice & put time on the vertical rather than horizontal axis, so making it the dependent rather than the independent variable.
There is some support for this proposal in the idea that our perception of time depends on the number of events, or memories, packed into each segment of our joint, severall or singular span of life. Not teleology – cause still comes before effect - but effects cause time.
It would certainly liven up the debate over climate change.
McBurney also spoke of his experience of being the child of older parents, with one grandfather, born in 1870, who could conceivably have spoken to someone who was at the Battle of Waterloo – which in itself collapses one’s notions of time.
Although I have no specific memory of conversation with my great-great-grandmother, it must also be conceivable that she had talked to one of Wellington’s veterans. But the oddest notion that I have been aware of in relation of time & the family is that it used to seem as if the 1920s & 1930s, covering the childhood & youth of my parents, just never existed. Because, in a way, from a child’s point of view, parents have no meaningful existence until the child comes along.
This sense of time having no meaning beyond a child’s own existence was brought home to me by an exchange with my 3-year-old daughter.
Out of the blue one day she asked me if I had ever ridden on a motorbike.
Oh my! Yes! I used to have a boyfriend with a motorbike on which I rode pillion.
So where did you used to put me?
Her mounting distress, at all attempts to explain that this all happened when I was only 14, well before she was born, during a time she simply had no existence, led me in the end to say that she just used to be fitted on to the seat between us.
Happy & satisfied, we got on with the cooking.
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