Considering Time

“Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.”

So said Thomas Mann in his philosophical novel, The Magic Mountain. A story which defined one semester of my college years, and proceeded to influence my early adulthood. The concept of time passage that Mann presents here is one with which anyone observing the current "stay at home" practices may suddenly be discovering. 

The country has generally taken a step back, things have slowed, the economy is falling apart, and amidst it all, we feel as though time has sped up. But it hasn't. It is the repetitiveness in every detail of our daily lives which has caused the "complete uniformity" of which Mann writes. We feel a blur when we look at the calendar and realize in shock what day of which month it is. Yet, strangely, we feel an unchanging permanence to our recently-found situations, whether good or bad; a sense that every day's similarity could fool one into reliving every day. And we do relive it, whether it means waking each morning to the sounds of one's children chatting quietly (such early risers) after you spend a night worriedly perusing the news, or whether one wakes alone to the same four walls greeting them and the same couch which has become their closest accomplice in navigating the current challenge. Whether one teleworks at home, their pay not necessarily affected, or whether one has lost their job and is struggling to make ends meet, each day repeats, too often in the same patterns of activity. The complete uniformity which Mann mentions is beginning to creep into almost everyone's lives, and there is a sort of silent desperation among even the most optimistic which whispers "where is this going?". 

But wait, what if we expand upon Mann's concept? Don't our daily lives sans confinement to our homes still have a certain uniformity to them? Doesn't that mean minutes are slipping away in even our "normal" routines - the Monday through Friday commute? The weekend activities? The daily metro ride in, or the same steps which are taken from one's car to the front door of their office? Yes. They are, in a sense. And there are likely psychological or physical reasons for that. But for starters, should we peruse the philosophical considerations of time? How would we go about taking on such a broad topic? What can we understand of time, or what thought experiments can we conduct, by simply seeing what those before us thought or did not think of it? 

In order to discuss this, I am (quite unsuccessfully) hearkening back to a paper I wrote for the same university class in which we discussed The Magic Mountain. It addressed the different types of time, although I’m having some difficulty recalling it (this I can blame on one of those types of time). To aid me in recollection and further explanation, I will be enlisting the aid of my lovely The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which I am fortunate enough to have decorating my bookshelves. However, before we can pick up with the encyclopedia’s topics (which appear to start with St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th and 5th Century C.E.), shouldn’t we look at what the ancients had to say? What of Plato and, that perennial favorite of mine, his precursor Zeno of Elea? (This Zeno is not to be confused with another of my favorites, Zeno of Citium, two hundred years later).