Love and Time in an Age of Fear

The problems of our world—and they are legion—come from our incomplete and misleading view of time. In his essay “That Which Is Held,” John Berger writes, “in the specific purgatory of the modern world, created and maintained by corporate capitalism, every injustice is grounded in that modern unilinear view of time, for which the only relation conceivable is that between cause and effect.”

It wasn’t always that way. Berger points out that the intractable quality of time—that all time is not experienced the same—used to be the way humans thought, and I suspect he means into as late as the 18th or 19th century. The cyclical view of time, as he calls it, sees a wholeness to life. Death is a companion to life, not its destruction, “a precondition…which came into Being from Non-being, one was not possible without the other.” As a result, people once thought of life as having three components—living, dying (which is brought on by time), and the timeless (which death cannot destroy). “Time was cyclic,” Berger writes, “and this meant that the ‘ideal’ original state would one day return or was retrievable.”

By contrast, our modern scientific world measures things, and as a result, time began to get measured in a more universal way around the 19th century. With that, time took on the power to control life itself—people started working by the clock and not by when the job was done or when the sun came up and went down, we began arranging our lives to be in certain places at certain times, and one day, inasmuch as time rolls on like a river—one direction only, no turning back—we die and it ends. As Berger puts it, “Modern thought has removed time from this unity and transformed it into a single, all-powerful, and active force. Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.” With that view of time, we face nothing but disappearing time and irretrievable living. We are always moving toward death, which in that view of time, is the end; time stops.

But we know from experience that what happens in time has no relationship to what happens on a clock, where every second is the same length and every minute is the same length and they tick off one after the other without fail and without pause. When we’re lost in a good movie, two hours pass in what seems like mere minutes, and when we’re waiting for news about a serious illness, an hour can seem like a day.

The way back to finding that unity of existence Berger describes is through love. “The utopia of love is completion to the point of stillness,” Berger writes. “The ideal act of love is to contain all.” And we know once again from experience that our expressions of love can change our view of time. “In every form of love, a past and a future are grasped as if present,” he writes. “The momentary ‘holding’ [time freezes, I think he means], seized by the imagination through the energy of love, realizes a whole, which is outside time.”

We do that best, perhaps, in the time we spend with the arts, and that our modern way of thinking has tried to stifle it by reducing artistic appreciation to a personal thing, a matter of taste only, that finishes a distant second to science and technology when it comes to understanding life. What we’re going through with COVID-19 makes a case in point. With the world at the point of apocalypse, we’re confronting the meaning of life itself, and the only answers we’re hearing come from science—medicine, epidemiology, exponential infection, etc. But I believe we’re figuring out that the things that truly speak to the meaning of life are our loved ones, our faith, the way music or poetry or a good novel remind us of who we are, our hope.

We do need the science to kill this terrible plague, but love, faith, music, hope: those are thing things that will heal us after the fear is gone.