Poetry and Reclaiming Time
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass,
Or else remove me hence unto that hill,
Where I shall need no glass.
Henry Vaughn, They are all Gone into the World of Light
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Job 38 4–7
A scientific analysis of time is not a comforting one. Not that truth should have to be comforting to be true, but it’s hard not to analyse entropy dispersing everything into the heat death of the universe as a kind of undoing of all of our concepts of meaning. Entropy is the most pessimistic concept of time we can imagine, the image of a time that will pull everything to a meaninglessness end of a story that is not a story, just nothing, until the other end of the big bang retracts us…
