I’ve been contemplating the meaning of ‘now.’
On the one hand, ‘now’ is the moment I’m experiencing this instant, here, in this place and time, namely a Timekeepers refuge deep in the Pliestocene.
Anyone reading this experiences their own ‘now,’ in their heads, in their own place and time.
From this perspective, ‘time’ is a sequence of ‘nows,’ starting in the past and stretching to the future. But my own experience shows that there are multiple ‘nows’ in the future. For example, there’s the ‘now’ where Hitler gets admitted to art school in Vienna and becomes a second-rate painter of landscapes. There’s the ‘now’ where Einstein never writes to Roosevelt about atomic energy and the Manhattan Project never happens. In fact, that’s the ‘now’ where I was born.
But there are ‘nows’ that arise from more obscure events. What if, for example, Scipio the Younger had died with his father at the Battle of Cannae? He would never have led the successful Roman campaign against Carthage, and in the ‘now’ of 2022 we might all be speaking languages derived from Phoenician instead of Latin.
I lost Haakon in London in 1933 where a similarly obscure event took place–or did not take place–that separates his sequence of future ‘nows’ from mine. The ‘nows’ of our mutual past include the Nazi Hitler and Scipio Africanus. But I only know about the Manhattan Project because the ‘now’ where I currently reside, inside this refuge, includes an encyclopedia entry with its history, a history that’s in Haakon’s ‘nows’ but not in mine.
I remember a painting by Salvador Dali that I once saw, The Disintegration of The Persistence of Memory. Mountains float in the background, reflected in a sea that is unwrapping in one corner. Melted clocks sag from the disconnected branches of an olive tree. Quantized blocks fill the foreground, descending from three dimensional to flat. It’s as if, in one painting, we have continuous, Newtonian reality, the warping of spacetime, and the death of the universe, all built on a quantized reality. It’s the disintigration of an earlier–and more famous–surrealist work by Dali, The Persistence of Memory.
I live in many ‘nows.’ Some are in my past, some are in my still-to-be-experienced future, some are in the neverland of might-have-been. But wherever and whenever they are, they all both real and the stuff of dreams. They arise in the fragile moment of a human breath, yet they are everlasting, from Big Bang to the heat-death of the multiverse and beyond.
Memory might disintigrate, but the eternal now abides.
Even if he never returns to me, Haakon can’t really be gone. He lives forever in the eternal now.
That realization doesn’t still my heart’s longing for him. But at this moment, as I exhale in this ‘now,’ it’s enough.