There will be time

Mary sat on the blue plastic bleachers at the empty middle school gym. I snapped my fingers, and looking into her 13-year-old eyes, I said, “Let’s see how long we can both remember this moment.” I haven’t spoken to Mary in a while, but I find myself reminiscing about her and the snap once every few years or so. In fact, I was just thinking about this yesterday, before I was interrupted by a man spitting on Broadway and 115th Street, saying, “There isn’t any time to get anything done these days.”

Tell me about it. There are simply too many books to read (or skim, at this point in the semester), too many papers to write, too many résumés to send out, and too many worries about final exams, jobs, the future, our lives, everything. All of this in what seems to be so little time.

In the hopes of cheering myself up, I visit a Web site that allows you to send e-mails “to the future.” I write, “Dear Yuri, By the time you read this, your last column will have been published, you will have finished half of your final exams, and you will be sipping black coffee, content with yourself.” I set the sending date to Dec. 18 at 6 p.m. sharp.
 
All this time, I was somehow lost from the present, only able to think about particular moments in the past and a future that will be in my inbox one week from now.

“Isn’t it funny how there’s no such thing as ‘now’?” I remember Mary saying. Seconds after I snapped my fingers, that moment was already technically in the past, and it only grows progressively more distant. But in comparison to what, if there’s no time in which the present moment is frozen?

It’s impossible to define or even grasp the present moment like the snap Mary and I heard eight years ago. The “now” keeps running off to the past, but the “now” is what’s also moving forward like the dial on the clock. But along with this metaphysical confusion are people’s tendencies to avoid the “now” as much as possible. At the end of the semester, it’s especially difficult to find anyone on campus who isn’t caught up in the unalterable past or the uncertain future.

A few hours ago, a student smoked her cigarette outside of Butler Library and said, “If I could turn back time, I would study more so I don’t have to cram for exams now.” Sighing, she tossed the cigarette on the ground and went back inside. I looked toward Low Plaza. I thought I spotted a beautiful star, but it started blinking red and blue lights, moving slowly westward. I guess I’m not really getting anything, after all. Not yet.

Mary visited me in the city two years ago. I had a terrible cold, and a very good friend of my mother’s had suddenly passed away. Shocked, terrified, medicated, and confused, I looked at Mary, and she said we should go out, get some air. We took the 1 train downtown, got off at a random stop, and walked into a bar. We were tempted to (illegally) consume alcohol, but we ordered two Diet Cokes instead and talked about the absurdity, fragility, and spontaneity of life.
“I still remember the snap,” she said.

On my wall, a poster of Dalí’s melting clocks and photographs of far-away galaxies haunt me as I write this very sentence. As I approach deadlines for school, my perception of time disintegrates, and then I figure, the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda soon anyway, which will burn my dead body and all of my current work into beautiful stardust. Aliens will photograph it and think, “How pretty.”

“Time, which changes people,” Marcel Proust wrote, “does not alter the image we have retained of them.” Just like that, snapshots of Mary, the gym, 115th Street, the cigarette, and everything else from my past linger in my consciousness like a collage of old Polaroids. And I remain disturbed and confused regarding the concept of time.
This is problematic, because I’m being tested on this topic in two philosophy courses next week. Time makes no sense to me anymore. Have I changed over time since the snap? Why do we always complain about having no time when we can’t even define the present moment? Am I just wasting my time thinking about time? Or perhaps this confusion and skepticism is exactly what I need to wrap up another semester of being a philosophy major. If anything made perfect sense, I would have nothing on which to philosophize.

“There will be time, there will be time,” T. S. Eliot wrote. And he’s right—there “will” be time. Just not now.

Yurina Ko is a Barnard College junior majoring in philosophy. She is a senior editor of the Columbia Political Review. 2+2=5 runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com