World Without End: Reflections on Time and The Time Traveller’s Wife (Hyperfuture series)
A funny thing happened. I was thinking about how life seems to have a different concept of time than I have. I underestimate the time it takes to achieve my dreams, overestimate the time it takes to forget the past, and wish that the good things that happened in my life arrived sooner. For a moment, I wished I could consult a fortune teller. One of the conversations we had at the gallery where I worked was how the fortune tellers who would do the rounds at the stores try to tap into an intrinsic human need and try to sell you hope. I wondered if it was a cruel thing to outsource your hope to “hope dealers”. And for that reason, I found it easy to pass up each opportunity to get a hand reading. But one day, the fortune teller decided to read who I was so he could convince me to agree to let him predict my future. He told me things that no one would know about me just by looking at me, things that even my colleagues who have been with me for a year don't even know. And that got me to think, what did I have to lose to have my future predicted? At least a year had passed when I remembered that moment, and as if on cue, the song “Antukin” by Rico Blanco was playing as I hopped on the bus, which couldn’t have been more perfect timing. Now would you call that fate, divine intervention, or randomness?
I imagine what it’s like for the husband in The Time Traveller’s Wife who time travels without warning against his will. And even with the ability to affect the past and see the future, it is no different for him. Life had a different concept of time than he did.
I guess that makes the second best thing to time travel to be clairvoyance or the ability to see the future. Today I know clairvoyance could be a curse. Because what if you learn that something bad will happen and you cannot do anything about it? The best and most reasonable way to live life is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But when you already know that tomorrow is not all it's cracked up to be, at that moment, clairvoyance has stolen the most important part of the future: hope. A better alternative would be the Nova effect or instances where a situation deemed to be negative ends up resulting in a blessing in disguise and proves that we cannot accurately prove something to be good or bad.
Our pastor once spoke about making our lives count for eternity. He quoted Einstein’s theory of relativity and his discovery that time does not exist, but is an illusion and, I later learned, a construct, as the earth hours don’t measure time but motion. He then told us that death is not natural but a consequence of the first sin. That got me thinking, maybe death is the real inventor of time. Isn’t death the ultimate irreversible event in time’s arrow?
The end places time into perspective. I’ve always thought the question “What would you do if you knew this were your last day on earth?” is a trick question. We’d all be doing what we’re already doing, perhaps besides meaningless work, unless you have to provide for someone til your last breath. Think people would suddenly find the words for what takes them a lifetime to tell? I’m not sure the end will necessarily bring clarity to what we’re supposed to be doing. Regina Brett has the best response: “If you don’t want to end your life with regrets, end each day with no regrets”.
It takes time to build a life of meaning, and only time will tell what stands the test of time, and yet the next minute can change all that. For all the tragedy of Time Traveller’s Wife, it is not without consolation. As Clare once sang in the musical, "I would stop right now and forget about tomorrow. I don't need to see tomorrow. Just to see your smile".
About the series:
Hyperfuture is a philosophical dive into what physics tells us about time. Hyperfuture is defined as “a space-time block, distinct from ours, situated in an additional temporal dimension: hypertime”. Taking from the quote, “to be conscious at all is to be conscious of time”, it explores the theme of clairvoyance, free will, chronoception, and time dilation in relation to how we create meaning of our ephemeral existence on earth. The series features works in realism, referencing actual scenes from life, and surrealism to depict the subconscious to explore whether time — a construct — works independently of consciousness. One symbol will be highlighted: the hypercube or tesseract, which shows the fourth dimension, time.
