This Instant, This Moment
Repost from November 23rd, 1997
Truth is a wonderful toy; otherwise things like one plus one does not equal two; a white horse is not a horse; earth is the center of the universe; and, my favorite, opposite to every truth is an equally great truth, would not be heard. If my favorite toy is true, it should be equally true that opposite to every truth, there is no equally great truth. Never mind whether that is true or not, one thing is definitely absolutely certainly true beyond any question: this instant is unique.
What instant? Ah! You missed it already. It is the instant I typed “this instant” in the last sentence of the first paragraph of this essay. I did my best to type the phrase as fast as I could. Still, to be clear, let us say it is the instant my index finger hit the key “t” to start typing “this instant.”
Who knows what happened at that instant. Maybe a subway train passed Kenmore Station in Boston. Maybe the lips of a pair of lovers touched each other on a street corner in Tokyo. Maybe a girl’s teeth just bit into a chicken, or a corn, or a dog, or a deer, or a mouse in Africa. Maybe one or two or three or more babies were born in a small village in China. Maybe a man tossed his wedding ring on his wife’s right shoe in Paris. Maybe a leaf just landed on a street brick in London, many more swinging down in the air, and many more sprouting in Sydney. Maybe a thirteen-year-old soldier gunned down a rival in Mozambique, another thirteen-year-old became a prostitute in Thailand, or an eighty-one-year-old woman died in a peaceful dream on her bed in Chile. Maybe a computer just had its ten trillionth calculation, or a conductor waved his hand at the ninth beat of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on a stage somewhere in the world.
It does not matter whether an eagle flew over the Great Canyon, or thousands of rivers poured millions of tons of water into the ocean, or a meteorite just hit the surface of Mars—that instant is unique. It never happened before, and it will never happen again, because it is composed of all the events of that instant, of that moment. One day that same subway train will pass Kenmore Station again, but its passengers will never be the same, will never have the same posture, will never think the same thing. The Tokyo lovers will kiss each other another thousand times, but their heart beat will be different, and their toes will be at a different angle. The rivers pour millions of tons of water into the ocean every instant, and the billions of waves, sprays, flows, and fishes will never be the same, as they were when my finger touched that “t.”
Even if all the impossibles happened, they would never happen together. A statistician can tell you how tiny the probability is of all the things happening in an instant, and that it is essentially impossible to repeat it. Just think of those leaves falling in air. If each of them has a fifty percent chance of facing up in the wind at that moment, the probability that two out of two leaves facing up would be 0.5 times 0.5, or 0.25 percent chance. The probability of having four leaves such that exactly two leaves facing up and the other two facing down would be 0.25 times 0.25, or less than seven percent chance. That is only four leaves, and we have not considered in what angle and at what height each leaf was, not to mention what the cells were doing inside the leaves. No wonder Lewis Thomas has no worry about cloning a human being.
Even if traveling in time was possible, no one will see an instant ever again. Imagine you were back to that instant in November 7 of 1997. Suppose you were sitting on a chair at that instant, and you went back there. You would have to fight for that spot with yourself. If you successfully threw yourself—the legitimate one—out the window of time, what you felt, saw, and thought would be different. Even if your mind never changed, your body could never be the same. How many of your cells have been renewed, and how many molecules have been breathed in and breathed out since that instant?
That instant was unique, as well as every other instant, and every second, every minute, every hour, which is composed of infinite such instants. If our every friendship, every work, every love, every failure, every life, every sight, every touch, and everything come from such unique instants, isn’t each of them unique too? Will we ever have it again? Just like this instant, this moment?
