Does Anybody Really Know What Time It is?

 

I'm in London, and the theme is time. Obviously, here, that's Big Ben, near Parliament and Westminster in the most powerful place in town. I'm ostensibly here to study and earn the last credits I need for my degree but not unexpectedly, I'm learning more than the art and history of royals and rebels. 

It started when I ran into an altar cloth in Westminster that was embroidered with one of the last lines of TS Eliot's Four Quartets: "When the tongues of flame are infolded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one."

These are puzzling words and when I found out they were Eliot, well, that made some sense, but when I looked at the poem, found that the poem in its entirety, all four parts of it, deal with time - its passage and nature. Eliot tries to answer the deepest questions of human experience - questions of time, purpose, futility and meaning. Of course, he concludes there are no simple answers, because there aren't, but there is hope in remembering the restoration promised by Christ. 

Then yesterday our little group went to see Henry the IV, ostensibly to witness old Gandalf, Ian McKellan, as Falstaff, 

but then I heard what Shakespeare had to say there about time, how it passes and what it brings. What it is and what it is not...because there is no time. Not really. Time is a construct, a way to describe what we understand as reality and, regrettably to try to measure it. That doesn't work well. There is only living and the moments of it, not only one by one, but the rush of them and the wind they create. The moving urge of it is here today, in the room where I write, at the hotel breakfast table surrounded by a hundred others speaking a dozen languages I don't understand, brought together by what seem to be tributaries in a vast stream. Our rubbing up against one another may be accidental or it may be a destined nature, but it doesn't matter. I feel like Millais' Ophelia, which we saw at the Tate Britain Gallery the other day...floating along in a beautiful stream and content to be so, whatever comes.

Like that.