Given that in the past year we've presided over not one but two millennium celebrations--first the noisy imposter, then the rather sedate real thing, or vice-versa, depending on your point of view--I've been thinking about time, about how we keep time and mark the moments and days of our lives. A millennium is not one of the units of time we normally use in daily life. Most of our clocks and watches keep time in twelve-hour cycles, not thousand-year epochs. Calendars keep time in larger chunks: a week at a time, or a month, with the occasional year-long photo calendar supplied by a local insurance company or gas station. But a millennium? That's a lot of time for a clock or a calendar to keep, much less a person.
Of course, there are clocks geared to time periods even longer than a millennium. One is the astronomical clock in Strasbourg Cathedral, dubbed the "Clock of Ages" by Brian Hayes, who wrote about it last year in The Sciences magazine. The clock stands inside the cathedral in a case of carved stone and wood 50 feet high and 24 feet wide. It is fully mechanical; everything is accomplished by wheels and gears, worms and ratchets, cams and followers, all driven by a pendulum.
The clock has a celestial globe in front that tracks the positions of 5,000 stars. As to time, the clock displays several versions: sidereal time, as measured by the earth's rotation with respect to fixed stars; local solar time, as measured by the position of the sun; and mean solar time, which averages out the seasonal variations in the earth's orbital velocity to make all days equal in length, exactly 24 hours. In addition, the clock also displays the current date, adding a day when required by leap year, and also displays the date of Easter, which is calculated using an arcane formula that can prove a challenge even for modern computers.
The accuracy of the Strasbourg clock is astounding, given that it must correct both for the seasonal changes in the length of the day and for changes in the earth's orbital velocity. If these corrections were carried out directly by the clock's mechanism, it would require the use of gears with some 80 million teeth. Instead, the clock approximates the corrections, but with sufficient accuracy that its error rate is less than a second a century. There are indications, however, that the clockmaker had periods of time even longer than a century in mind. The leap-year mechanism includes parts that move only once every 400 years; they came into play last year and will now lie dormant until the year 2400. There is also a gear deep in the works of the ecclesiastical calculator--the mechanism that determines Easter Sunday--that turns once every 2,500 years. And the celestial sphere out in front of the clock is geared to reflect shifts in the equinoxes of the earth's orbit that complete a full cycle once every 25,806 years. This is a mechanical clock we're talking about, built more than 150 years ago.
What was the clockmaker thinking? Will anyone 10,000 years from now want to know the date of Easter? Will anyone 25,000 years hence trek to Strasbourg Cathedral to check the orbital equinoxes? Even if they do, I'm not certain that it's useful for us to live our lives with them in mind. We have more pressing reasons to keep time, in smaller units that are more important to us.
We have a millennium to inaugurate, for example. Whether today is the first or the fifty-third Sunday of the new millennium, a thousand years is rather a long time, at least in human terms. It's an expanse of fifty generations or so, depending on who is counting. How one evaluates such a period depends on where you stand and what you look for. In some ways, life on earth seems to have improved enormously since the year 1001, with antibiotics and indoor plumbing and widespread literacy, as well as the mass communication of ideas and the mass production of goods, not to mention the spread of democracy and the decoding of the human genome and the advent of microwave popcorn. In other ways, we seem to have made no progress at all. Crusades and inquisitions have given way to holocausts and genocide, but the change is mostly that the words are different and the weapons better. What has tragically stayed the same is the human penchant for responding badly to things we fear and people we do not understand.
For better and for worse, the second millennium is over. The time--a thousand years--has passed. And what those ten centuries might say to us depends on whether we try to plunge ourselves into the drama and destiny of each minute and day, or whether we try to step back, godlike, and view the millennium as a whole, from afar. In other words, should the hands on our clocks mark the minutes and the hours, or the centuries and the millennia? The challenge of keeping time is knowing what kind of clock we should build, how long it should run and what sort of time it should keep.
Arthur C. Clarke, the legendary science fiction writer and futurist, insists that any clock that runs on earth time is far too provincial. He writes:
Go out beneath the stars on a clear winter night, and look up at the Milky Way spanning the heavens like a bridge of glowing mist. Up there, ranged beyond the other to the end of the Universe, suns without number burn in the loneliness of space. Down to the south hang the brilliant unwinking lanterns of other worlds--the electric blue of Jupiter, the glowing ember of Mars. Across the zenith, a meteor leaves a trail of fading incandescence, and a tiny voyager of space has come to a flaming end.
Looking out across the immensity to the great suns and circling planets, to worlds of infinite mystery and promise, can you believe that we as human beings are to spend all our days cooped and crawling on the surface of this tiny Earth--this moist pebble with its clinging film of air? Or do you, on the other hand, believe that our destiny is indeed among the stars, and that one day our descendants will bridge the seas of space?
I don't know the answers to those questions--whether, when this moist pebble with its clinging film of air burns to a cinder someday, it will leave only a glowing ember where human hopes and dreams once held sway. Or whether some time before then, a thousand generations from now, our descendents will bridge the seas of space and discover who knows what other worlds. I don't know. Arthur C. Clarke believes the bridge to other galaxies will be built sooner that we imagine. Perhaps he is right. But even if he is, knowing that a few hundred centuries hence our descendants might set out across the Milky Way does not help me organize my week or set priorities for my life. In that respect, even a millennium is difficult to come to terms with. My personal clock is not calibrated to millennial rhythms. My schedule is not timed to intergalactic events that occur every 25,000 years. I don't know exactly how long my personal clock will run, but I have solid evidence that it won't be nearly that long.
If my calculations are correct, today--January 7, 2001--is the 15,841st day of my life. Based on current life expectancy calculations, plugging in the usual variables--gender, race, blood pressure, cholesterol, number of times I cross Lexington Avenue each day to get coffee (I'm not certain whether the crossing or the caffeine is the greater risk factor)--the average person like me can expect to live a total of about 87.5 years, or 31,935 days. To make certain the results of my calculations were fair and accurate, not to mention legally binding, I used three different life expectancy calculators and averaged the results. They suggest that if I am average, I have 16,094 days left to live, or 253 more days to live in my future than I have already lived in my past. The middle day of my life, in other words, is most likely to be May 6 of this year--a Sunday, of course.
What is the significance of this discovery, here on the cusp of a new millennium? For me, it's very simple. If you and I the ones thinking about time and taking its measure, then it's our life time that matters most to us. When compared to a day or even a month in your life or mine, a millennium may as well be forever, 25,000 years an eternity, and a trip beyond the Milky Way a journey into infinity. That's one reason wrist watches record twelve hours at a time, and not a century or a millennium. Twelve hours is a useful block of time. We can make decisions about what we hope to accomplish within that time, tasks we wish to perform, people we want to connect with, differences we have decided to make.
This tethering of time to our individual perspectives, by the way, is fully endorsed by the most far-reaching discovery of the scientist who was arguably one of the greatest minds of the second millennium: Albert Einstein. Einstein's theory of relativity, like most epoch-making insights, is both enormously complex and elegantly simple. It is summarized for the non-scientist by Richard Brennan in his recent book titled Heisenberg Probably Slept Here: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Physicists of the 20th Century. The basic theory of relativity is made up of four statements.
The speed of light is always constant.
At the speed of light, time stands still.
At the speed of light, mass is infinite.
E = mc2
Brennan goes on to point out that the theory of relativity does not state that everything is relative. It only states that some things people once thought were absolute, such as time and space, are relative; and some things people had thought were relative, such as the speed of light, are absolute. The theory also concludes--this is the crucial part--that since these natural laws are the same for all frames of reference, both time and motion are relative to the observer.
In other words, there is no godlike place to stand from which we can observe the expanse of time and the sweep of history. There is only the place where you and I stand: in this moment, on this day, filled with whatever fears haunt us and whatever hopes lure us on. There is nowhere else to stand but here. Time does not come to us in thousand-year blocks, but only in momentary fragments, to use as we wish, to construct what we want. Both the magic and the meaning of life occur at the level of the moment, not of the millennium.
What if May 6, 2001 is not the middle day of my life? What if I don't live to be 31,935 days old? That will be a tragedy for me only if I dismiss the present as mere prelude to the future. It's not. The present is all we will ever have. The clock of life keeps time from moment to moment, marking our chances to live fully and love deeply. So when Arthur C. Clarke invites us to go out beneath the stars on a clear winter night, and look up at the Milky Way spanning the heavens like a bridge of glowing mist and across to the great suns and circling planets, to worlds of infinite mystery and promise, and he asks, "Can you believe that we are to spend our days on the surface of this tiny Earth--this moist pebble with its clinging film of air?" I answer yes--all our days: each and every precious one. Copyright AllSouls 2001.