Bjørn Stærk blog - Thoughts on time and history

Saturday December 31, 2005 by Bjørn Stærk

Something odd happens to time as it moves behind us into the past. It changes speed and character. A year seems longer than last month times 12, a decade longer than last year times ten. An event that seems random today may be remembered as meaningful a year from now. The present is confusing, it is full of choices between conflicting options and goals. But there is no confusion in the past, only stories: meaningful series of events.

The past is not just behind us on a timeline, it's a different world, a world that plays by different rules. This seems natural to us, events flow effortlessly from one world to the other, from the world of the present to the world of the past. The way I experience this the present has a "tail", maybe a few months long, and beyond that my memory of events as I really experienced them fades away. Anything beyond a year or so is firmly in The Past, and barely feels connected to the present at all.

I've found a trick to get the speed of time in the right perspective. If I try to bring the year 1906 to mind, I'll usually load a model of history and look for my concept of that year in it. It is an abstract concept, built out of historical data, and following "historical" rules. It was the decade before the first world war, it was a year after the indepence of Norway, it was the end of this, and the beginning of that. It's all abstract, and very, very remote.

But now think of the last year, the one that is ending. Remember it, remember living it, remember walking through each and every day of it. That is one year. Now imagine a hundred of that. Or last week, and 5200 of those. Whatever unit of time you use will give a different perception of time, but as long as you use a number that is imaginable, and a time unit that plays by "now" rules, (today, this month, this year), the result will be more accurate than just thinking of "1906". This makes the past seem, to me, more recent. Only when I think of it as history is a century an eternity, as it really went by it was just a hundred times last year.

Events move first out of the present into memory, then out of memory into books. In each stage they are distorted, made different, more like a story. The present is not a story at all, we'd find it absurd to think of "today" as a chapter in a story. What would the story be about? Would it have a moral, and why would anyone want to hear it? "And there came a day when Bjørn woke up, and he ate breakfast, and he surfed the web a bit and read a book, and .. " Not like a story at all.

But then present becomes memory, and joins what we think of as the ever-growing story of our life. The more we talk and think about our past, the more it becomes a story, our story. It gains a moral, and entertainment value, a hero and meaning. "1995 was a year that changed my life in nearly every way, most for the better. It all began when .."

Eventually some of our life stories merge with other data and, through books of history, become the Great Story of the world we live in. My life story has gained several morals and entertaining anecdotes in the telling, but the Great Story is full of them, and they are greater morals and more entertaining anecdotes too. What else is worth remembering?

Gone is all confusion, and most individuals, and nearly all of what occupied their attention when they lived. In their place we put History, a model of the past which noone alive at the time would have recognized, ("what do you mean our civilization is in decline?!"), and which obscures the continuity and short distance between then and now.

Without a historical science the distortion would be even worse: The past used to be nothing but a collection of entertaining morality tales, or, as we call them, legends. But even with a historical science, distortion remains. The present moves by now-speed, and plays by now-rules, the past moves by story speed, and plays by story rules. We see "ages" and "civilizations" and "great men and women", and give these ages and cultures and people a "character", and parts to play in the stories we tell.

there's live on-the-spot reports on the CNN between the ad-breaks
so you think you know what's going on - but you don't
because you weren't in Belfast, no you weren't there
and no you weren't in Waco, no you weren't there
and you weren't in Kosovo, you weren't there
and you weren't in my head so you don't know how it felt

Take a moment to consider how far reality has been distorted at this point, from the confusing and unstorylike now of billions to the abstractions and stories of history. I am not saying there's a better way to do history, I'm just pointing out its limitations. When you think of history, don't think of us peering into the past, like God through a TV screen, think of historians of the future trying to tell the story of your life. They weren't there, and even if they get all the details of their story right, and they won't, most of their readers will think of it in terms of a story, and not as a decades-long stream of presentness similar to their own.

We can't reconstruct those streams of presentness from the past, but we can keep in mind that they existed, that the life stories and histories we tell after they've passed by are like fossils, weak imprints in stone which only give us an outline of the original organism.

We all know this, but there's a difference between knowing in a rational way that history is distorted, and believing it - seeing the past not through abstractions and stories but as a continual presentness, understanding that reality has always been what it is now, that all people at all times have perceived it through the same senses as we do.

This awareness makes the past not only seem more similar in character, but also closer in time. Not even a thousand years is really a long period of time. History makes it seem long, history makes even 5 or 20 years seem long, (think of "the 80's"!) We think in terms of "ages", and "decades", and the arrival and departure of generations. But a thousand years of presentness does not seem to me a long period of time. Neither does ten thousand, all of known human history.

And just as the past is shorter than we think, the present is larger. Imagine that all the people who have lived since 1000 BC stand before you in rows, one row for each lifetime of 60 years or so. We will only have 50 rows, but the last row, the one that contains everyone alive at the present, will contain about 6,5 billion people. Imagine a column of people 50 rows deep, and up to 6,5 billion in width. I can imagine 50 lifetimes, but I can not imagine 6 billion lifetimes. I don't have an intuitive concept of the number 6 billion. A thousand, yes, even ten thousand, but not much more. 6 billion!

In the lifetimes I would need to see the pyramids built, I couldn't even fit the people of the street I live in. And the lifetimes of everyone who is alive today would last me 20 times the age of the universe. We think the past is far away, and the present nearby, but it is really the other way around. The past is smaller and closer than we think, and the present is larger and more distant on a scale we're unable to comprehend.

Happy new year, everyone.