Time, Love and the Great Barrier Reef
In H.G. Well’s most famous novel, “The Time Machine,” his time traveller describes how he climbed aboard his machine and set off through the future. The machine moved slowly at first, but then…
“…as I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing…I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute and every minute marking a day…The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me…”
The machine speeds up even faster, “the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full…the jerking sun became a streak of fire.“
It’s not easy to alter the flow of time; to press the accelerator or put on the brakes. There are the well-known time travellers, great novelists, for example, such as Wells and Marcel Proust. Wells was 22, experiencing fever-dreams from consumption; Proust was in his late thirties and surrounded by the fading beauties of France.
There are the scientists, too — Einstein, of course, who appears to have first started time-traveling at the age of 16 with thought experiments about light waves. Darwin, meanwhile, learned to fly on time’s wings when he was 26, having witnessed the 1835 earthquake in Concepción Chile. It was this earthquake that awakened Darwin to the immense procreativity of geologic time.
Time can seem to move quickly or slowly. For most of us it’s beyond our control — or seems that way, like riding a bucking bull. Where did it go, we ask? Or when will this be finished? I’m so bored.
But some people, these time travellers, are able to control this speed.
“Boredom,” wrote the poet Joseph Brodsky in his essay “In Praise of Boredom”, “…is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”
“I Have a Time Machine,” writes another poet, Brenda Shaughnessy.
But unfortunately it can only travel into the future
at a rate of one second per second,which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant
committees and even to me.
Slow, yes, but the point is, it’s controlled. Traveling at “one second per second” for prolonged distances is difficult to do. Try it and you’ll see what I mean. Shaughnessy, like many brilliant poets, is an accomplished pilot of time.
I bring this up because I’ve been trying to imagine how the world might appear to a time-traveller whose time machine is floating, 500,000 years ago, just off the coast of northeastern Australia. The deep cobalt blue of the ocean; and as we begin our travels into the future, picking up pace, the moon spins “swiftly through her quarters,” the sun a “streak of fire,” the land, strangely, like a water-logged sponge, losing its buoyancy, appearing to sink ever so slightly.
Along with this sinking, nearby, like a slowly surfacing whale, a grey-green crystalline substance begins to coalesce. The water begins to thin, becomes translucent, and as the years fly by, we can see an increasing array of dark and subtle hues within, along with the first flickers of luminescence.
Because our time machine is submersible (how convenient!) we can drop (why not?) a meter or so beneath the glassy tide, and there behold a throbbing, shifting, mesmerising quilt of colours, more and more vivid with each passing decade. Ribbons of red, sparkling yellows and greens, furls of velvety magenta, clusters of pink. The intensity increases; the tide of citrus and emerald glow, infused with light and lightning. A great mural of life, a 500,000-year work of meticulous beauty.
And then, as we approach our modern era, this pulsating spectacle doesn’t begin to dim, as we might expect. It doesn’t fade in the way it had so slowly emerged. It’s not like a living creature traveling through a long but normal life-cycle — born, growing full, reaching maturity, and then becoming weak with age.
Rather, at the height of its magnificence, all bluster and bloom, it’s as if someone flicks a switch. Not in parts either; not like someone moving room to room, island to island, turning off the lights one by one. No, certainly not at the speed at which we sweep through the year 2017 and beyond. Rather, it’s more like a complete power outage; like when an ill-fated car brings down a power line. Or the sort of rolling blackout you see in disaster films. The whole thing — over a thousand miles of magic — suddenly switching off.
It’s a depressing thing to imagine, incomprehensible, something most Australians would rather not consider. Fair enough, too. There are countless worse things to consider. And countless better things. (Ever seen a sloth riding on a speedboat?). Most of us aren’t born as time travellers. We’re not trained to stand in quietude and consider the millennia. Brodsky might be able to open the window to time’s infinity, but for most of us, the window is old and rusted and near impossible to open (because, no doubt, our minds reside in someone else’s investment vehicle, where fare matters more than air).
We may live in a time machine, but only as passengers, like children in a restraining seat, the view out the window passing at its own pace; speeding, slowing, occasionally stopping at a traffic light.
This would all be well and good if we didn’t, now and then, fall in love with the world outside the window. Nothing more than love compels us to frantically seek out time’s steering mechanism; and nothing more than love causes greater anguish when — once we stumble upon the buttons, gauges, levers of time — we discover it’s impossible to remain in the past longer than our existing lifetime.
H.G. Wells’s time traveller, as he hurls through the future toward the year 802,701AD, is so intoxicated with the heady feeling of speeding through time that he almost decides to keep going, to give himself over to eternity and leave the world behind forever. He doesn’t, of course. He lands his machine. He falls in love; has a romantic adventure. (I’ve always felt The Time Machine is less a work of science fiction than a romance novel).
When he returns to Southeast London, back to the year 1898, it’s not his accomplishment that matters most to him. It’s not his discovery of the future society, the Eloi and Morlocks, or even the science of time travel. It’s a pair of mallow flowers (Malvaceae sp.) which were gifted to him in that future place — symbols of Pacific island beauty — and it’s the sentiment of which they remind him, that he holds so dearly in his pocket.
