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TIME is Not Actual

Time is one of several tools we authors use when crafting a story, propelling the story forward emotionally, building momentum toward its climax. A character’s past and future are always relevant to the present. The pivotal moment of fiction affects not only that moment but every moment that came before and all that will come after.


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Henya Drescher

2 years ago | 4 min read

How do people hypothesize time?

Humans have a complex bond with time. Our modern lives are structured mainly by linear time and its precise measurement, a continuum that goes from the past through the present to the future. But is it continual, a march from one second to the next?

Many physicists and philosophers now believe that time is not structural; instead, they believe time emerges out of something more essential — something nontemporal, perhaps something quantized that comes in separate chunks and not continuous.

What specifically do we know about time?

Do we conceive time moving from top to bottom, right to left, or front to back?

Albert Einstein changed our grasp of time by incorporating it as a factor in his theory of relativity and claimed that: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

Our one system of maintaining track of every event in the universe and on Earth has been assessing them to the current day with the consistent movement of time — a one-way flow that constantly progresses, clear from our use of clocks and calendars. 

But this equation comes with its own wrinkle. The consistent movement in time is fully reversible, running backward as well as forwards, giving no direction to time. That is at odds with our perception, in which time determines our direction of travel, propelling us headlong into the future.

The Eastern mind is not as fixated with time as Western thinking is. Those who live in the Near or Middle East know they are event-oriented rather than time-oriented as we westerners. Time is perceived as one prolonged present moment. The clock does not rule their lives. Tenses in Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek are not primarily concerned with time but rather the flow or type of action.

Jewish time

Recently, I came across the saying “Jewish time” or “Hebrew time,” and it immediately made sense to me. I never stopped to think about the rare times I attended services scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. that might not start until 8:30 or 8:45.

I wondered if the times have changed or because of different ethnic influences, but the reasons don’t matter. What matters is that it’s possible to have more than one sense of time. We may think of clock time as time, but it is a form of machine time, and some alternatives are forms of natural time and human time.

Jewish time is centered on remembrance. The recited commandment to memorize goes to the soul of our idea of time. Without memory, there is no history, no past, or expectation of the future. Without memory, there is no knowing, no understanding, no learning. Without memory, there is no keeping time. There is only becoming servants of the monolithic time of our clocks and calendars.

A distant but historical future

Unlike the Enlightenment paradigm of progress, the Hebrew take on linear time is not a modern march of history, seeing time as an arrow shot from the past to the future.

In the Talmud, the rabbis teach that: “there is no early or late in the Torah.” Time is fluid, bending, wiggly. Jewish tradition dictates that we, individually and as a group, are a bundle of memories and hopes, a tightly tangled knot of past, present, and future.

Like many other pre-modern notions of time, the idea of time as a cycle plays a critical role in the Hebrew Bible. Time in the Bible is structured around the repetition of meaningful events. Rev. Dr. Peter Leithart, the president of Theopolis Institute and serves as a Teacher at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, sees this as the core of Day 4 of the conception story detailed in Genesis 1.

God creates the celestial lights to coordinate time into festival seasons, signs, days, and years. Foremost among these is the religious festivals — time is organized around God’s relationship with his people as exercised in these festivals.

The past

In the material world, time is perceived as past, present, and future. In the spiritual reality — the eternal reality of God and the soul, time is conspicuous by its absence — Some thinkers believe that TIME is not actual — it is a concept to help us distinguish between now and our perception of the past.

We have the illusion that the past has already happened, and the future doesn’t yet exist. But we have a brain, and the only reason we feel like we have a past is that our brain contains memories. Which, in essence, places us in the future — the now, the present.

A professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, Huw Price, asserts that the three core components of time come from our mental states, not the physical world — a current special moment, movement or passage, and an absolute direction.

One characteristic of time perception many of us share is how we think of our past. We see it as a gigantic video library, a library we can plunge into to recover events in our lives.

Time is one of several tools we authors use when crafting a story, propelling the story forward emotionally, building momentum toward its climax. A character’s past and future are always relevant to the present. The pivotal moment of fiction affects not only that moment but every moment that came before and all that will come after.

The placement of each scene is relevant to its emotional impact in the mind of our story and not strictly to its linear telling.

The alternative, of course, is our intuition that time flows, the present is super exceptional as the only real moment, and the profound nature of reality is one of becoming.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this article.

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