In the wake of Husserl, Martin Heidegger writes—as far as my love of the clarity and transparency of Galileo’s writing allows me to decipher the deliberate obscurity of Heidegger’s language—that “time temporalizes itself only to the extent that it is human.”115 For him also, time is the time of mankind, the time for doing, for that with which mankind is engaged. Even if, afterward, since he is interested in what being is for man (for “the entity that poses the problem of existence”116), Heidegger ends up by identifying the internal consciousness of time as the horizon of being itself.
These intuitions of the degree to which time is inherent to subjectivity remain significant also to any sound naturalism that sees the subject as part of nature and is not afraid to speak about “reality” and to study it—while at the same time acknowledging that our understanding and our intuition are radically filtered by the way in which that limited instrument—our brain—works. This brain is part of that reality that consequently depends on the interaction between an external world and the structures with which the mind operates.
But the mind is the working of our brain. What (little) we are beginning to understand of this functioning is that our entire brain operates on the basis of a collection of traces of the past left in the synapses that connect neurons. Synapses are continually formed in their thousands and then erased—especially during sleep, leaving behind a blurry reflection of that which has acted on our nervous system in the past. A blurred image, no doubt—think of how many millions of details our eyes see every moment that do not stay in our memory—but one which contains worlds.
Boundless worlds.
They are those worlds that the young Marcel rediscovers, bewildered, every morning, in the first pages of Remembrance of Things Past, in the vertigo of the moment when consciousness emerges like a bubble from unfathomable depths.117 That world of which vast territories are then revealed to him when the taste of the madeleine brings back to him the flavor of Combray. A vast world, a map of which Proust slowly unfolds during the course of the three thousand pages of his great novel. A novel, it should be noted, that is not a narrative of events in the world but an account of what’s inside the memory of a single person. From the fragrance of the madeleine at the beginning, to the last word—“time”—of its final part, “Time Regained,” the book is nothing but a disordered, detailed meandering among the synapses of Marcel’s brain.
Proust finds a limitless space and an incredible throng of details, fragrances, considerations, sensations, reflections, re-elaborations, colors, objects, names, looks, emotions . . . all within the folds of the brain between the ears of Marcel. This is the flow of time familiar from our experience: it is inside there that it nestles, inside of us, in the utterly crucial presence of traces of the past in our neurons.
Proust could not be more explicit on this matter, writing in the first book: “Reality is formed only by memory.”118 And memory, in its turn, is a collection of traces, an indirect product of the disordering of the world, of that small equation written earlier, ΔS ≥ 0, the one that tells us the state of the world was in a “particular” configuration in the past and therefore has left (and leaves) traces. “Particular,” that is, perhaps only in relation to rare subsystems—ourselves included.
We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.
This space—memory—combined with our continuous process of anticipation, is the source of our sensing time as time, and ourselves as ourselves.119 Think about it: our introspection is easily capable of imagining itself without there being space or matter, but can it imagine itself not existing in time?120
It is with respect to that physical system to which we belong—due to the peculiar way in which it interacts with the rest of the world, thanks to the fact that it allows traces and because we, as physical entities, consist of memory and anticipation—that the perspective of time opens up for us, like our small, lit clearing.121 Time opens up our limited access to the world.122 Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of our identity.123
And of our suffering as well.
Buddha summed this up in a few maxims that millions of human beings have adopted as the foundations of their lives: birth is suffering, decline is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, union with that which we hate is suffering, separation from that which we love is suffering, failure to obtain what we desire is suffering.124 It’s suffering because we must lose what we have and are attached to. Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.
Such is time, and because of this we are fascinated and troubled by it in equal measure—and perhaps because of this, too, dear reader, my brother, my sister, you are holding this book in your hands. Because it is nothing but a fleeting structure of the world, an ephemeral fluctuation in the happening of the world, that which is capable of giving rise to what we are: beings made of time. That to which we owe our being, giving us the precious gift of our very existence, allowing us to create the fleeting illusion of permanence that is the origin of all our suffering.
The music of Strauss and the words of Hofmannsthal sing of this with devastating delicacy:125
I remember a little girl . . .
But how can that be . . .
Once I was that little Resi,
and then one day I became an old woman?
. . . If God wills it so, why allow me to see it?
Why doesn’t he hide it from me?
Everything is a mystery, such a deep mystery . . .
I feel the fragility of things in time.
From the bottom of my heart, I feel we should cling to nothing.
Everything slips through our fingers.
All that we seek to hold on to dissolves.
Everything vanishes, like mist and dreams . . .
Time is a strange thing.
When we don’t need it, it is nothing.