A bubble in the flow of Time

Time is of your own making,

its clock ticks in your head.

The moment you stop thought

time too stops dead.


Angelus Silesius, 17th century

Considering how long has been since my last post, you would be excused if you thought I've gone to Bennington, Vermont... :)

I wish.
But no. I have been around, just not in Vermont.
Time has its way with us regardless of where we are.

Or does it?

Here is a story you might find interesting.

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ESCAPE FROM TIME

The great thing about time is that it goes on.

Arthur Eddington

"Although theologians and philosophers wrangle over the technicalities of the logical relationship between time and eternity, many religious people believe that the most powerful insights into the subject are provided, not by academic debate, but by direct revelation:

I remember that I was going to bathe from a stretch of shingle to which the few people who stayed in the village seldom went. Suddenly the noise of the insects was hushed. Time seemed to stop. A sense of infinite power and peace came upon me. I can best liken the combination of timelessness with amazing fullness of existence to the feeling one gets in watching the rim of a great silent fly-wheel or the unmoving surface of a deep, strongly-flowing river. Nothing happened: yet existence was completely full. All was clear.

This personal story, recounted by the physicist and Anglican bishop Ernest Barnes in his 1929 Gifford Lectures, eloquently captures the combination of timelessness and clarity so often said to be associated with mystical or religious experiences."

***

Now that gives a different meaning to the expression "flow of Time"...
I wonder what Leonardo (da Vinci to you) would say to that.
Here's what he did say about water as a metaphor for time:


"In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes, so with time present."

(from LEONARDO DA VINCI'S NOTE BOOKS)


Regardless of his many - and truly great - talents, time ailed Leonardo as much as it ails any prince or pauper of this world. It seems - but I may be totally wrong - that the one thing Leonardo missed was "mystical" - or, if you prefer - profoundly spiritual insight into the nature of... well, nature. Nature as an appearance, a semblance - an illusion.

It cannot be blamed on his era, even though its defining feature - its "humanism" - relied on a fundamentally flawed foundation: the premise that man is the alpha and omega of Creation (by implication making man's faulty interpretation of the sensory input as "all there is" a generally accepted standard of "reality") .

After all, even epochs deeply steeped in "humanism" could not prevent "mystic" insights by individuals here and there. Angelus Silesius, the author of the opening quote here, was such an individual: an extremely interesting individual.

Still, I cannot blame Leonardo.
But that's yarn for a different story altogether.
In fact, I am already sorry I mentioned it here.


Anyway, the story of bishop (and before that scientist) Ernest William Barnes and the accompanying text are an excerpt from a fascinating book I would recommend reading to anyone despairing over the apparently irreversible "flow" of time: