Time for Summer Reading

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s our annual summer reading list. And it’s about time.

Ray Briggs
Righ—summer reading on the subject of time. Today’s show, if you can believe it, is the 500th episode of Philosophy Talk. That got us thinking about the nature of time, and what we might read about it over the summer.

Josh Landy
So we asked a poet, a physicist, a political scientist, and a philosopher of all written about time to help us think more about this timeless topic.

Ray Briggs
And to get us started, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, in search of lost time—inside the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Reading Marcel Proust can be difficult, no matter how much spare time you have. Take this Monty Python sketch for example.

Monty Python
As you may remember, each contestant has to give a brief summary of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu,” once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress.

Holly McDede
In this sketch, finalists compete in the All-England Summarize Porust Competition. The first contestant attempts to describe Proust’s work as “tales of the irrevocability of time loss, the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the RE installment of extra temporal values of time regained.”

Monty Python
Ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of a humane religious experience restating, as it does, the concept of intemporality. In the first volume, Swann, the family friend—

Holly McDede
Then he runs out of time—which, if you did want to summarize Proust, is not a bad place to begin. Time is, after all, a major theme of his seven-volume masterwork.

Natalie Vanderlinden
Je pouvais aller jusqu’au porche de Saint-André-des-Champs; jamais ne s’y trouvait la paysanne que je n’eusse pas manqué d’y rencontrer.

Holly McDede
That’s Natalie Vanderlinden, reading from the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. She’s from Belgium and lives in San Francisco. She set out to read all of Proust because she was looking to be transported.

Natalie Vanderlinden
It started with a desire to really reconnect with my culture. Who I am is the language I speak.

Holly McDede
And so she began.

Natalie Vanderlinden
I read the book in 19 hours, with just interruption for drinking tea or eating a piece of orange or using the bathroom.

Holly McDede
Now she says the only proof she has that this happened at all is that it transformed her. It was like existing in multiple places at once.

Natalie Vanderlinden
After the performance, I was still not sure where I was. I was reading so much for some part of the story to come. And it was in the middle of the night I was thinking, did I dream that part? Did I dream it? But no, it’s because the part I was thinking about is in the second novel.

Holly McDede
The goal was to experience the words physically: following every story, every memory, the twists and turns of time. And then later on the bumps and screeches of subway trains.

BART Announcer
10-car train for San Francisco-Airport in 9 minutes.

Holly McDede
She decided to bring the experience of Proust to the commuters of San Francisco. As she read out loud in French, passengers stopped to listen for brief moments.

Natalie Vanderlinden
It’s like a big poem to me. It’s so beautiful that you can actually carry it with your day and that’s good enough.

Holly McDede
The subway Proust readings are on hold right now. But Natalie’s goal is still to finish reading all seven volumes. Because after all..

Natalie Vanderlinden
The seventh book is when he’s finding the time again. I would like to finish that journey one day.

Holly McDede
In the meantime, she still has the memory of reading “In Search of Lost Time “on subway trains. Proust might even describe the experience as being fixed forever in memory—the general excitement of being in a strange place, of doing unusual things

BART Announcer
10-car San Francisco-Millbrae train now approaching, platform 2.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks, Holly, for that great piece about one of my favorite authors. I’m Josh Landy, with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today, on our 500th episode, we’re compiling our annual summer reading list. And it’s about time.

Ray Briggs
So what exactly is time—and what isn’t it? For help with these basic yet slippery questions, we turned a physicist Carlo Rovelli, author of “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” and more recently “The Order of Time.”

Josh Landy
So in this new book, Carlo summarizes years of research on the problem of time which, he says has fascinated him since childhood. So what IS the problem of time?

Carlo Rovelli
There are many problems of time. The first one is that time definitely does not work in the way we usually think about it. For instance, we think of time is something common. All over so that if we take two clocks and separate the two clocks, when they come back, they have the measure the same time, there’s just a time pastored between separation and and when the two clocks meet again. But that’s false. That’s only an approximation. If we have precise clocks, we see that clocks measure different times, depending where they are.

Ray Briggs
So does that mean that it could be a different time for Josh than for me?

Carlo Rovelli
Absolutely. I mean, I don’t know how tall you are. But the one of you, I think Josh is taller. All right. All right. So Josh brain is gonna live a little bit longer than you. So when you meet, you got to be younger, and he has to be older than you. That’s a fact. So I mean, can be checked in the laboratory, the reason we are not used to this strangeness is because in our environment, this phenomenon, not very strong, you have to go in a bigger planet or in your black hole to, to for this phenomena become very, very strong. Another one, which, to me is the most striking at all, this is a bit harder to describe it is the fact that the notion of present, it’s really an approximation, there is no really notion well defined notion of present in the in the universe. And the thing goes like that, I mean, you and I are having a conversation. And we are in the same time, right? So I can hear you now. And you can hear me now. But actually, there is a little delay in our way of communicating because it takes time for any lighter signal or forms noise to go from me to you. So I actually hear you a little bit in the past. And if I look around me, I see things in the past, right? Because time, lights takes time to fly from things to my eye. So present literally doesn’t mean anything. If you ask what is happening right now in a different galaxy. There is no meaning into that. And any meaning that you can give to the now there it’s contradicted by some of you situation that makes it nonsense.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so there’s no present. But surely there’s a past in the future, right? So isn’t isn’t the present just the stuff that’s not past and the stuff that’s not future.

Carlo Rovelli
These are here and now, right? For each of us, there’s a hearing now, and there’s my past, and my future, which are definitely different than your past and your future. So there is a relational past and future, of course, there’s a passive future for you, meaning, everything you can see more or less as your past and anything I can see more or less is my past, but they don’t match. So the effect on the on our notion of what it means to be real, is dramatic, right? If you if I want to say that What is real is real now. I’m just lost doesn’t square with with today’s physics?

Josh Landy
Does it? Does any of this have to do with the binding problem? In neuroscience, I mean, we have to our minds have to take a variety of sensory input and bind them together into a single representation of things that we take to be happening now. And that, of course, takes a little bit of time. Is that the extension of what we each take to be our present moment, that little window of time in which the various sensory inputs come in and are bound together?

Carlo Rovelli
I think that the answer is no. And that’s one of the key themes of my book. What we mean by time, it’s not really the clock time is something else, we have memories. And we anticipate the future. In fact, according to at least some current neuroscience that the main thing that our brain does our brain accumulate memories of trying to anticipate the future. So for us the time is this complicated thing about memory future integrating signals that arrive? And this is time for us is not the time of the clock clocks, don’t have memories don’t think about future. I mean, the this is a very specific thing for us humans. So we make a mistake when we try to project this complicated exponential times down to physics. And vice versa. We make a mistake by thinking that our experience short time is just the the time of physics. And in philosophy, this is an idea which is is not new, I mean, who certainly has discussed that a lot along retention and the fact that Augustine and St. Augustine, in fact, I think is a is a great intuition of St. Augustine. And when when he says, How is it possible that a hear a musical phrase, given the fact that in each moment, I mean, one single moment of time, so I should hear one note at a time, what, how do I get the sense of the music? And then he from that he goes on saying, Well, time, for me is really memory and memory in anticipation. I think it’s absolutely right there.

Ray Briggs
It seems like a lot of non human objects have memories to certainly other organisms. So trees sort of grow rings, and they can be used as historical records, like rocks kind of erode in one way and don’t exactly underwrote backwards in the other way. So it seems like some kind of memory is part of the natural world and not just of us as human beings. How do I square that with with the idea that sort of memory is a human perspective dependent thing?

Carlo Rovelli
Time is not one thing. It’s a layer of things. And in the macroscopic physical picture, which is not our brain is just nature described by macroscopic variables, these heat these temperature, there is thermodynamics, there is entropy that grows and there are traces. Traces are what you just mentioned, traces are absolutely not something that our brain imagines right? On the moon, there is a Creator, and the creator is there, because a meteorite fell on the moon in the past, not in the future. So that’s a trace. So traces are out there, no doubt. But traces are a funny thing. Because if you think microscopical, if you if you knew all the details of phenomena, using the equation of motion, you can evolve back and forth. So in the present this perfect knowledge of the past and the future, while traces is only the past. So what is it? How is it possible?

Josh Landy
You mentioned, entropy and entropy is usually the fact that gets physicists thinking that in fact, time does have an arrow does have a direction that right? The universe started in a low entropy state, and we’re gradually heading towards higher entropy states. And that’s why your, your glass breaks, would you drop it, it doesn’t magically, usually get put back together? Just makes me wonder whether in fact, there aren’t some things we can say objectively about time, right? So maybe I can’t say that there’s an objective present moment. But isn’t there something like an objective shape of time, right, that time has an arrow wherever you are in the universe?

Carlo Rovelli
It’s not that this subjective, what we say about the world is not also subjective, either. What we say about that involves ourselves. A sunrise is not subjective thing. It’s just a perspectival thing. It’s different. I think the mistake we make about time is that we have an intuition. Okay, I have an intuition about what time is it flows, it passes past future present problem, either. It is like that. All it’s not like that this mysterious system. It’s illusionary, it’s not doesn’t exist. There isn’t one thing about time timing, there’s many things about time, the arrow is just one of them. The distinction between past and future is just one of them. The effect of flowing is another one, the factors being common for all them is another one. Each one of these aspects of what we call time, is rooted in a different level, in a different set of phenomena and different signs that we use for describing this phenomena. If you go down down to quantum gravity, we don’t use any time variable at all, we only use relative variables. So and if I may conclude one less part of this pile of things, which is time. There is a recent thing that surprised me a lot. I read in it, I came back, which is a political philosophy. And I read in in Heidegger, which is the opposite camp of philosophy, the same comment, which is that every time we talk about time you there is something emotionally non neutral for us in time. And I think this is true, strongly because time impressed us, all of us. Right. It touches you asked me about time, we’ll talk about time. And I think that this emotion of time, is not a something that confuses us. We should get rid of the scent better. It’s a very major part of what time is for us because we are We as human beings are clearly time beings right? Believing time we think in time we are. We are a process that involves temporality, otherwise we wouldn’t exist them. And not only that, but we we anticipate the future we we know we’re gonna die. So time is what make us lose, things get fixed. And this emotion of time, I think is again one core aspect of what time is for us.

Josh Landy
Carlo Rovelli, author of “The Order of Time” and other very readable books on physics. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re celebrating our 500th episode by putting together our annual summer reading list all about time.

Ray Briggs
Coming up, we’ll talk to poet Jane Hirshfield and political scientist Elizabeth Cohen about their recent books that investigate time in surprising ways.

Josh Landy
More time for summer reading—when Philosophy Talk continues.

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our 500th episode, Time for Summer Reading. I’m Josh Landy, here with my Stanford colleague, Ray bBriggs.

Ray Briggs
Time isn’t just a physical thing. It’s also got political value: deadlines, waiting periods and political calendars are just some of the ways that the state can exercise power over its citizens.

Josh Landy
Elizabeth Cohen is professor of political science at Syracuse University, and author of “The Political Value of Time.” We asked her to tell us more.

Elizabeth Cohen
The political value of time very often treats time as a form of currency that citizens can use to transact with the state. So our time can have value if we are allowed to wait a certain amount of time to acquire certain types of rights or goods that we want from the state. And the state can make us wait for things or structure our time using deadlines in ways that kind of constrain our power, or our ability to acquire things that we want to acquire, engage in activities we want to engage in. So, you know, deadlines can take the form of political calendars in which we schedule elections and get an opportunity to, to weigh in on on how politics are going. And then we have various waiting periods for citizenship for goods that we want to acquire, and in some cases, for getting our rights back if we’ve committed crimes or been incarcerated, things like that.

Josh Landy
So the state or corporations or other entities that have power can make us wait for things. And they can set up these unjust differentials between people who get things fast, and people get things slowly, people get things that on some uncertain time. What about cases where they give us time like parental leave? Do you think that’s an important case for thinking about the relationship between politics and time?

Elizabeth Cohen
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I’d say that parental leave is a case of kind of giving people time, it’s restructuring what’s asked of them in a specific amount of time and a specific period of time. And there’s really interesting things to think about in the context of lifespan. All right. So there are certain periods of our lives in which we’re going to be asked to use our time in one way or another and being forced to make difficult choices or impossible choices about how we use our time is something that good politics, or good political arrangements can prevent or minimize. So I would say that a good parental leave policy is either an employer or the state, recognizing that we don’t have the same temporal needs in all phases of our life, and then addressing those competing goods.

Ray Briggs
So I’m persuaded that treating people differently and taking time differently from some rather than others is a form of kind of inequality and injustice. How do we fight back when that happens? What should we do about it?

Elizabeth Cohen
Well, it’s that’s a really good question. And I There are many things about this book that I felt like really satisfied by like I, I locked up the argument nicely to my satisfaction, and the question of kind of resistance was not among those, because of course, we can use our time. I mean, there are cases in which you see people with very little power trying to use one of the only things they have which is time to fight back. So things like strikes and deliberate slowdowns or using time to obstruct the state. The thing is, the power differential is so great. Very often the state can wait out anybody who’s on a hunger strike or attempting to stop working long enough to get the state to pay attention. It is very difficult even when they’re organized for individuals to use their time kind of battle back using their time.

Ray Briggs
I’m also curious about sort of more institutional forms of collective action. So should it be illegal to have differential waiting periods based on a protected characteristic? Is that I think that’s a possibility.

Elizabeth Cohen
Yeah, I think that is a really important and terrific question. I think that, you know, we come to use time to transact in liberal democracies, in part because we tell ourselves these things about time, like everybody has time time, you know, proceeds at the same rate for everybody. It’s, it has this egalitarian guys, like looks a gala terian. And so, in a liberal democracy, using time like making people wage, rather than paying for citizenship, or doing a blood test to show that they’re the right kind of person, it actually is probably more egalitarian than some of the other options, even though time itself is of course, not an equalizer, because we’re not all similarly situated in with respect to like, where we are in the lifecycle, or how much we need to get something at a particular moment. But the thing about that idea of egalitarian ism is that once we’ve committed to we’re doing this because it’s fairer, and it’s more equal, then when you treat people’s time differently, for no good reason, right? They’re similarly situated people, and you treat their time differently. You’re engaging in a pretty, I think, profound form of unfairness. And in this book, I go through and look at kind of discussions about why we make people wait for things. And something that comes up over and over again, is that something happens during time, that affects people’s character that they develop in ways that matter and qualify them for things they weren’t qualified for at an earlier point in time. So if you make somebody wait longer than some other similarly situated person, you’re, you’re actually saying that their character did not develop that they don’t. They’re impervious to processes that actually affect other people. And, and that’s a really, really strong and I think, not good statement for the state to be making about similarly situated people.

Ray Briggs
So I’m actually really surprised that that is a rationale for making people wait, because my guess at a rationale, my first sort of impulse was to think it was pragmatic, like I am sometimes on the phone with my insurance for a long time, and you just can’t get health care to everybody at the same time, because you don’t have enough people to do it. So you put people in a line for that reason, which doesn’t have anything to do with the value of anybody’s character. So I’m, I’m a little bit like, it seems almost moralistic to think that you should make people wait to develop their character, if you can do things faster for them.

Elizabeth Cohen
Yeah, um, but, again, this is why citizenship and naturalization is such a revealing case. And it’s why I spend so much time thinking about it, because citizenship is not a scarce good. We don’t have to go like hire more HR people to make more citizenship for people like we could not impose a five year waiting period for lawful permanent residents to naturalize. None of those waiting periods have anything to do with scarcity or a queue, or anything like what would cause a health insurance company to make you wait for something? And yet we do.

Josh Landy
So Elizabeth, I just wanted to flip the question on its head and, and ask, how not just how politics can affect time, but how time can affect politics. I think about things like for example, generational change, you know, you, you’re banging your head against the brick wall over and over again and never get anywhere. And then you know, you wake up 20 years later, and the problem just went away because you got a new generation. So what do you think about the effect? Not just a politics on time, but of time on politics?

Elizabeth Cohen
Yeah, so the the generational question really intrigues me, and I spent a lot of time in this book talking about Condor, se and a little bit less, but sometime talking about Jefferson as well, because they were two thinkers who really were quite taken with the significance of organizing time and politics. So a political calendar in which elections had stages and the stages were the right amount of time for the activity that was occurring, whether it was deliberation or solitary thought or collective decision making. They both really thought schedules and calendars had to be just right for a democracy to work. And one of the things they agreed on was that with generational change should come automatic political have changed. So Jefferson, I think, put it the most pithily said that the dead should not rule over the living meaning, we better give people the opportunity to totally revise the Constitution once. And he had actuarial calculations for this once the amount, the lifespan of the those who had written accounts to tuition had passed, because the dead, you know, should not rule over the living and if the living don’t constitute themselves, then they are ruled over by the dead. So generational change now often means what you’re describing, which is we get used to certain things and then other things, you know, vanish before we were ready for them to vanish. But I don’t think we consider enough that with the passage of time, probably our right to have a say in politics may strengthen or attenuate.

Ray Briggs
Elizabeth Cohen from Syracuse University, author of “The Political Value of Time.” Today, we’re compiling Philosophy Talk’s annual summer reading list, and it’s about time.

Josh Landy
“You go to sleep in one room and wake in another” That’s the title of a poem by Jane Hirshfield in her new collection, “Ledger”—just one of the poems they’re offering a creative meditation on time.

Ray Briggs
Jane is a prolific poet and essayist, and one of our favorite past guests. So we asked her about the relationship between time and poetry.

Jane Hirshfield
I would say there are three main ways that poetry conducts itself in regard to time. The first way is that it embodies it and that is because thought and feeling and language and poetry are always married to music. And so a poem is an instrument that’s only available to us inside of time, sentences are linear. The discovery and Epiphany of poems and the emotional shift of them take place over time, and sound work and poetry has everything to do with time it elasticizer set a long gates that quickens, it turns out, and poems remember themselves within time, with their repetition of rhyme and meter, and the echoes that are there even in poems that are free verse and don’t seem so formal. The second thing poems do, in a way they are like all art an attempt to obviate time. So a poem written 300 or 3000 years ago, speaks right into this moments experience. And there are you know, 4000 year old Sumerian aphorisms, borrowed bread is not returned, that this alive today as it was 4000 years ago, and one of the things which has been traveling with me during this time of pandemic and shelter and unknowable future, are 400 year old words from Shakespeare, be not a feared the aisle is full of noises. And then the third relationship that poems have to time is they address it and investigated quite directly, you know, every good love poem boughs to the knowledge that love ends, and transients and perishability and time, they are simply among our most central human perplexities, grief looks backward, hope looks forward, and this is an axis of our experienced lives.

Ray Briggs
You’ve got a new collection, “Ledger.” Would you be willing to read us a poem from that collection?

Jane Hirshfield
I’d be glad to. And I think I’m going to give you one, which I would say is particularly acrobatic in its relationship to time, which is looking at the present from the point of view of the future, as if the present were become the past. And I think this is one of the ways that the lens of language allows you to see and feel things acutely and clearly. So, the poem was called, Let them not say, Let them not say we did not see it. We saw let them not say we did not hear it, we heard let them not say they did not taste it, we ate, we trembled. Let them not say it was not spoken, not written. We spoke we witnessed with voices and hands. Let them not say they did nothing. We did not enough. Let them say as they must say something a kerosene beauty. It burned. Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, wet by its light. Pray hist and it burned. And that, of course, is a poem about the crisis of climate and biosphere. And it is imagining a future in which we did not wake up in which we did not change our ways.

Ray Briggs
One thing about let them not say that I noticed that was sort of strange to me is that the tone of the poem is almost fatalistic. So it it assumes that sort of we saw is a fixed thing in the past. And it assumes that like it burned is a fixed thing in the past, but it it’s sort of act like what people say about it is changeable in a way that the event is not so it’s let them not say, as though that actually could be legislated.

Jane Hirshfield
Exactly, it’s a plea to the present, looked at from the point of view of the future. And so that’s what I meant when I said, this is a poem which is particularly acrobatic and its relationship to time, there’s all these loop de loops and twists. And you know, the arms are run under the knees, and it’s hanging from a trapeze. And yet people seem to understand it perfectly. Well, it’s a poem that was published the day of the inauguration in 2017. And it went wildly viral, because everybody understood what it was saying, you know, let them not say they did nothing.

Josh Landy
It sounds like that connects back to what you were saying about the way in which poetry shapes time, because here you have a poem that keeps repeating over and over again, like a tolling Bell, let them not say, Let them not say let them not say. And, in one sense, of course, that’s just a repeated call to arms. But I wonder if it’s also, you know, taking something whose temporal scales almost unimaginable. And while making it a little bit more manageable, because the poem itself keeps repeating this thing, it keeps bringing it back to almost a present moment.

Jane Hirshfield
Yes, exactly. So, and the other thing that it tries to do, because poems are always interested in taking the complicated view, and not the simple one, it also wants to admit that, you know, this very phenomenon by which we might destroy the world is also for us. comfort and beauty, and ordinary life. You know, I spent years living in a place in the wilderness without electricity with kerosene lamps. You know, I contributed my fair share and more of, you know, carbon economy emissions. They were beautiful. And we warm ourselves by it, and we read by it. And I think that’s very important as an ethical approach to the catastrophe. None of us is innocent. None, none of us are partaking of this conversation on this day, right now, has not contributed more than our fair share, to the emptying of the reservoir of the world’s resilience. And the question is, was will resilience be enough to answer back and restore if we do our part?

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the nature of time and discussing books about time for our annual summer reading list—our 500th episode.

Josh Landy
Coming up: more with poet Jane Hirshfield, and Stanford philosopher Jorah Dannenberg with a time-centric story to recommend, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back. I’m Josh Landy and it’s time for summer reading on Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Today it’s our 500th episode, and we’re thinking about books that question the concept of time.

Josh Landy
Let’s return to our conversation with poet and essayist Jane Hirshfield. Here she reads a poem from her new collection “Ledger” entitled “Hazal for the end of time.”

Jane Hirshfield
Break anything, a window, a pie crust, a glacier, it will break open. A voice cannot speak cannot sing. Without lips, teeth lamina propria coming open. Some breakage can hardly be named. Barely be spoken. Rains stopped, roof set, fires forest City’s cellars peeled open. Tears stopped. I set and unhearable music fell instead from them. A clarinet stripped of its breathing, the cello abandoned the violin grieving a hand to long empty held open been the Imperial piano it’s 89th 95th 91st strings on summoned, on woken, watching, listening was like that. The low wordless humming of being on boven fish vanished. Bees vanished. Bats whitened Arctic ice opened. Hands wanted more time, hence thought we had time spending times rivers its meadows, its mountains, its instruments tuning their silence. Its deep mental, broken. Earth stumbled within and outside us, Orca, fissile Kestrel withheld their instruction, rock said, burning ones pry your own blankness open, death set. Now I too, am orphan. That is the bleakest poem I have ever written. And the darkest thought I have ever thought, the end of that poem, The poem terrified me, when I wrote it. What the poem is imagining is, if death does not exist, if no living beings exist to stand witness to time, that is, what the end of time would look like. It is an unimaginable abyss. And the poem frightened me so much that I had to write another one afterwards and apology for it, because I felt like I was being rude to the beauty of existence all around us, by allowing such despair to come onto the page.

Ray Briggs
I’m kind of wondering if like the view of time and with meaning here is sort of like both like wonderful and terrible at the same time. That last line, like you said, suggests that death having meaning and time having meaning is just a matter of our human perspective. So if those go away, it kind of like in some sense, like it all goes away.

Jane Hirshfield
Well, and a matter also of all living creatures, not just humans, but you know, if death were an orphan, it wouldn’t just be because we humans were gone, it would be because the last microbe was gone. And that’s a pretty dark thought. I mean, I know it’s not going to happen. There are lots of resilient species on the earth, like rats and cockroaches and possibly even us that will survive, you know, almost any imaginable debacles short of you know, when when the sun actually explodes. But it is impossible for us to imagine, non time our psyches can’t do it, we can’t get there. But we can imagine non life because every single one of us is going to die. And every one of us has lost someone to death. And so this is how I’m trying to terrify myself and the rest of us into behaving a little different, like, practical philosophy.

Josh Landy
To be sure, it’s a bleak thought. But it’s, this is an extraordinary poem. It’s really one of my very favorites in the collection. And one of the things I love about it is the way in which the rhymes work. Yes, these to my ear, it almost feels like you can feel in the flesh, entropy happening. You can feel the flesh disintegration. The first two lines rhymes so perfectly, it’s the same word open, open. Yes, then you start to get other words that rhyme pretty well spoken and open. It’s not a perfect rhyme, but it’s pretty close. But then you have from them, which is a little bit weaker. By the end you’re like outside us and instruction. And it’s as though you feel the world falling apart. Did I get that? Right?

Jane Hirshfield
You got that absolutely perfectly. Right. That is what the experience of writing this poem was enacting within me, the falling away the falling apart, that it is imitating with it sounds, the process it is attempting to conjure, so it’s an onomatopoetic poem, and it was written by the sound you know, some poems are written, all my poems are written by musicality, and by a speaking voice that has rhythms and sound awareness in it. This poem was written by its rhymes, there are things in it that would not have been said, except for having to find the words that made the sound echo and then find what led to them so that you heard that rhyme in from them. Thank you for honoring my art by recognizing so well the material and medium that makes it alive.

Josh Landy
Poet Jane Hirshfield. Her new collection of poems is called “Ledger.” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, ad today we’re compiling a summer reading list all about time.

Ray Briggs
So Josh, I know you’re a big fan of the writer Ted Chiang, nd there’s a short story of his that you’ve taught with our Stanford colleague, Jorah Dannenberg.

Josh Landy
That’s right, it’s called “Story of your life” and it got adapted into the movie “Arrival,” which Jorah and I have talked together in our film and philosophy class. But the original short story by Ted Chiang, that’s one of the great stories about time. Here’s Jorah to tell us more.

Jorah Dannenberg
So the narrator of the story is a woman named Louise who’s a linguist and Louise is telling this story to her daughter, and in fact recounting to her daughter, important events from her daughter’s life. And right from the beginning, there’s something really kind of curious about time going on in the telling of this story. Because it’s not entirely clear where Louise stands in relation to the events that she’s describing. The story begins with the decision that Louise and her husband Gary make to have a child. But Louise is also remembering events that she’s kind of looking forward to after that point.

Josh Landy
Yes, she’s remembering the future, right, that’s when you’ll be a month old.

Jorah Dannenberg
Exactly. And she’s also experiencing as if in the present things that have happened in the past prior to that point. And and what we learn is that Louise has worked as a translator with this race of aliens that have arrived on Earth. And the aliens, in fact, experience time in this fundamentally different way than human beings do. They experience time all at once they perceive events simultaneously. And rather than seeing them as kind of ordered in terms of prior causes and later effects, they instead perceive things as ordered in terms of purposes or goals, they have a kind of tele a logically structured form of consciousness. And it turns out that Louise through learning, they have to pod language, they’re called Hepta pods, these aliens has also come to experience time in something like the way that these Hepta pods do, at least partly, her own form of consciousness is kind of a mashup between the human way of experiencing time sequentially. And this alien Hepta pod way of experiencing time, simultaneously.

Ray Briggs
So Jorah, that reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse Five,” which Ted Chiang mentions as an inspiration. Yeah, and

Jorah Dannenberg
I’ll say, I love both of these pieces of fiction, Slaughterhouse Five and the story of your life, one thing that I really appreciate about story of your life is that war, Slaughterhouse Five, tends to make it sound a little appealing to live in this kind of alternative form of consciousness, where you experience everything all at once, there’s a lot of focus on, you know, sort of not being sad about people who have died, because you can kind of be experiencing them as alive at any point, I tend to think that the story of your life is, in a way much more ambiguous and or invites a little bit more ambivalence about what it would be like to be in relation to the world in this fundamentally different way.

Josh Landy
So there’s a certain kind of serenity that comes with this extra temporal frame of mind, right? You can see all the time at once. And so yes, there are some moments where things are going badly. But don’t forget, you know, there were other moments where things are going well. So how is it that story of your life takes this frame of mind that seems so appealing, and turns into something more ambiguous?

Jorah Dannenberg
In a way, I think the kind of experience that Louise has, is, in a way much more uneven than what you describe as this, you know, kind of tranquility that might come from having kind of simultaneous experience of everything. Louise experiences, the highs and the lows, and she has a kind of melancholic quality to her, which in the film, I think is even more pronounced in the portrayal of the character by Amy Adams. But even in the story. There’s, of course, a real tragedy at the heart of this story to which we haven’t yet mentioned, which is that Louise’s daughter who the story is being told to dies young, she dies, we learn in the story, at the age of 25, in a rock climbing accident, and one of the kind of tragic facts about Louise’s experience is that she knows this for the entirety of her daughter’s life, and in some sense, has to look forward to it. But because of the way in which her relation to time is described as being kind of altered in this more alien way, she doesn’t really have a choice in the matter she’s, she’s neither bound by the future nor free in any sense of freedom that we would recognize. And so she kind of In addition to reliving all of the good moments with her daughter and enjoying all of the time with her, is also kind of perpetually experiencing the tragedy and the loss. And that’s certainly one of the more striking ways in which I think the kind of ambiguity gets in there.

Ray Briggs
So if you could foresee the death of your child, why wouldn’t you just stop it?

Jorah Dannenberg
Yeah, I mean, that’s the question in some sense. And there’s a quite long reflection in the middle of the story on the way in which knowledge of the future would affect one’s decision making. And the first thought is exactly the one that you express Re. If I knew the future, wouldn’t I have the power to change it by choosing different actions than the ones that I would be predicted to make. But the way in which this story tries to resolve this paradox is by suggesting that for the Hepta pods and for Louise insofar as they experience time in this fundamentally different way, it’s not quite the case that they understand themselves as free to choose their actions, nor do they understand themselves as determined or bound by the future, they instead see themselves as something more like enacting the future through a kind of recognition of history’s purposes, so to speak. And I think we’re invited to think that in some ways, this is such a fundamentally different mode of experience, that it’s not altogether clear that we could completely comprehend it. Although I think Chang does some wonderful things to try to get us as close as possible in in imagining what it might be like.

Josh Landy
I want to come back to something you were saying earlier about the beautiful ambiguity in this story, which I think is also a little bit in Slaughterhouse Five. I mean, so both of these fictions offer us a sense of consolation for death, right? Death is a terrible thing. And yet, if you could see, all of time, like the Hepta pods do, you would see that actually, everything has a reason, right? There’s a kind of teleological order to things. And yet, and here’s where part of the ambiguity comes in. For me, here we are reading the story. And as we read the story, we read it sequentially. We don’t see the story all at once we get one page after another. And that’s kind of awesome, because that’s the way we get to be surprised. And that’s when it gets to be suspense and drama. And we love those things. And we couldn’t have any of that, if we lived outside of time, if we if the future felt to us just like the present. Is that part of the ambiguity for you to draw?

Jorah Dannenberg
Yeah, I think this is a wonderful point about the story. And I’ll do one better in a way, which is that I think this is a story that requests in fact demands to be read more than once, in part, because the first time you read it, of course, you don’t know what’s gonna happen in the story. And you’re surprised and you’re shocked. And you’re pleasantly delighted. And you’re sad as the events unfold in the course of the story, just as you said, you can’t help but experience the events in time as you read. But of course, once you get to the end of the story, and you know how the story goes, you can go right back to the beginning of it, and you can reread it. And when you reread it, you’re actually you might think in a little bit more like the position of Louise or the Hepta pods, you now know something that you didn’t know the first time through about the arrangement of the events in the story and how they might serve the purposes of the story you can, so to speak, come a little closer to kind of seeing things all at once, rather than experiencing them sequentially. But the way Chang depicts Louise’s experiences, the flip side of that is that the tragedies are also kind of ever present for her. And so there’s a kind of melancholic, tragic quality to her experience that I think invites us to, to wonder whether whether it would be better whether it would be worse, or I’m tempted to say, and I think the story at least, puts this on the table as an option. Whether that comparison really in the end can be fully made sense for us whether it might just be that this is so fundamentally different than the way in which we experience things that are concepts like better and worse than for that matter the sorts of concepts that we use to evaluate choices as good or bad choices, well or poorly made, whether those concepts can even carry over to this alternative way of experiencing things. It might just be so fundamentally different that it doesn’t make sense to call it better or worse. It’s just, it’s just in commensurable in that way.

Ray Briggs
Stanford philosopher Jorah Dannenberg on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” You can find all the books we’ve talked about on today’s show, along with other timely recommendations from our listeners, over at our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.