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.

***

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:

The Vanishing Point

There is an interesting thread going on at ATS right now, which naturally reminded me of a popular »time slip« story, known in several variants.

The most famous one speaks of a David Lang of Gallatin, Tennessee.

According to the story, on September 23, 1880, Lang was walking across the grounds of his farm to meet Judge August Peck who was approaching his farm in a horse and buggy. Lang's wife, Chanel, was supposedly watching him walk towards the judge. And then, the story goes, Lang vanished mid-step - in full view of the judge, his wife, the two children, and the judge's brother-in-law. The ground was searched in case he had fallen into a concealed hole, but no hole - or any trace of Lang - was found.

Some variants of the story add that Lang's children later called out to him, and heard a "disembodied voice calling as if from a great distance".
Personally, I find much more interesting and compelling the version that says that the spot where he had vanished was later found to be overgrown with exceptionally lush green grass: a sign that insects would not touch it.

However, research shows that the "David Lang" story probably originated as an article: "How Lost Was My Father?" published by journalist Stuart Palmer in Fate magazine (nro. 40, July 1953, pp. 75-85). Palmer claimed that he had been told the story by Lang's daughter. But no trace of David Lang or his family, including his apparent daughter, was ever found in any records.

The entire article was later determined to be a hoax likely inspired by the short story "The Difficulties of Crossing a Field" by Ambrose Bierce, collected in his book Can Such Things Be? (1909).

The story - as a similar one, involving a Oliver Larch (or Lurch, or Lerch) from Indiana - has since become a popular urban legend.

However, there is something about »urban legends« that self-proclaimed skeptics (and let's not even mention the so-called »debunkers« - a name that is as obnoxious and vulgar as the mentality of some of the individuals who fall into this category) seem to ignore: many legends, including »urban« ones, bespeak a wider reality, a wider experience of a phenomenon. In other words, even if the specific data – people's names, places, time of the occurrence – aren't factual, certain stories grow into »legends« because people have the actual or instinctive, intuitive experience that such things are indeed possible and have occurred.

Furthermore, there are disappearances that seem perfectly genuine – and they haven't been solved.

One such story speaks of a Mr. James Telford (also reported as "Tedford" and "Tetford"), an ex-soldier who lived in the Soldier's Home in Bennington, Vermont, in the USA.
He is supposed to have been fiercely against »airy fairy« stories and allegedly did not believe in anything »supernatural«. (Just how people knew this – and who were they - I don't know, although I assume this piece of information came from his relatives. I have yet to found any direct testimony.)

According to his family, on December 1, 1949, Mr. Telford, age 65, was on a bus, returning home from Saint Albans, Vermont. There were 14 other passengers on the bus. They are said to have all testified to seeing him on the bus, asleep in his seat. But when the bus reached Bennington, Telford was nowhere to be found. His luggage and bus timetable were found on the bus, testifying to his presence (or somebody's who had his belongings, at any rate). But Mr. Telford himself was not found – ever. It was as if he had vanished into thin air.

I've always thought that his disappearance might have been explained somehow, because the sad fact is that older people tend to become less »visible« to the world. In other words, people pay much less attention to older people and – perhaps – even tend to expect (or discount) certain patterns of behaviour based on a stereotypical perception of the elderly.

Still, it does sound odd that none, not one, of the 14 alleged witnesses would have noticed his getting off the bus earlier – or missing it altogether (after putting his luggage on the bus) - if that were the case. Besides, that still wouldn't explain why Mr. Telford was not found later.

I have searched the Familysearch website for the mysterious Mr. Telford (also the variants "Tedford" and "Tetford"), but found nothing relevant (although there was in Vermont a Mr. James Telfer who, judging by his age, could have been our Mr. Telford's father.)

However, this doesn't mean much. First of all, the name could've been distorted or misspelled – either in the story (very likely) or in the filed documents themselves (oh yes – it happens much more often than you might think). I even searched for »Thetford« – again, found nothing – but then gave it a rest, because, being a genealogist myself, I knew how futile such a search could be.

What makes this story even more compelling is the eerie fact that it belongs to a seeming cluster of disappearances centered in the area of Bennington, Vermont. They happened in the late 1940s and early 1950s - and, so it seems, only in autumn/winter time.

But more on that next time.