A duration of you

How long is a life? How should it be measured? In love? In memories? In broken dreams or in dreams unfortunately come true? Tagore writes, “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” The life ahead of you must indeed be far more than enough, for just like Tagore’s butterfly, you are now counting every moment.

You insert the key in the keyhole, one twist, two twists, the door protests loudly as it is forced to reveal a total darkness. You flip a switch, throw the phone on the couch, open the refrigerator, take out the leftover and put it in the microwave oven. The oven lights up, the glass plate begins to rotate, one turn, two turns, round, round, round… half a minute, one minute, one minute and a half… Before you, another sleepless night. Every night would be like that, round, round, round, day in day out, month after month, year after year—time insidiously stretching and repeating itself beyond salvation.

Would it be any consolation to you if you know time does not really exist? Augustine of Hippo asks in his Confessions, “What is time?” We all knows time is be divided into three parts—past, present, and future. We tend to picture it as something extended, something with length, like a length of twine. At one end is the past, at another end is the future, and the present is somewhere in between. Yet we also know that the past and the future don’t really exist. For we cannot see, hear, touch, or in any other way interact with them the way we do a twine. Whatever we interact with is in the present. To think fondly of childhood is to conjure up a present image in your head, and so is to entertain visions of old age. But if the past and the future do not really exist, Augustine asks, how can we say something happened ten years ago and another thing happened one hundred years ago when neither ten years ago nor one hundred years ago is real? Moreover, what is the duration of the present? One minute? One second? One blink of an eye? No, the present does not have a duration, for duration implies a past, which does not exist. And if the present is only a slice without thickness through which time flows from the future, which does not exist, to the past, which does not exist either, we must say time itself does not exist. Time is not real the way the twine is real, the way you and I are real. Augustine then comes to a conclusion: time is just an extension of the mind. Time is a fiction, a narrative device in the stories we tell ourselves. Augustine, were he alive today, would claim that modern physics validates his argument since time in fact is not a variable in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which attempts to marry quantum mechanics and general relativity. According to that equation, at the most fundamental level, reality simply dispenses with time altogether. It is only for us, with out meagre consciousness, that time exists.

Does time exists for her, you wonder, laying there on that hospital bed? Or perhaps inside her the past, the present, and the future have smashed into one another, pushing, pulling, mixing in an ocean of sensations? The sweet empty words you whisper in her ears, your hand gliding downstream in her hair as she stares at rain drops sliding down the window—her feet flies over the threshold amid your laughters and her mother’s screaming—the faintest cigarette smell on your fingers—she hugs you from behind, giggling, “I’m two months late”—you are screaming, she is screaming, a love boiling over, leaving at the bottom its very opposite—her best friend nods towards you, “See that actor guy over there?”—the slightest averting of her glance as she dances down the aisle towards you—a white bra lies across a capsized black shoe—your glance surreptitiously thrown over the shoulder—her wet hair gleaming like fire in a winter night. Is she reliving those moments in her coma? Perhaps you will never know. Perhaps she will forever reside in that dream world, where time swirls strangely, where a lifetime shrinks into a moment and a moment becomes eternity. Perhaps from now until the day you die you will measure your life in your endless questions and her absolute silence.

Perhaps in another world, she is sound asleep in your arms and all is well. They still cannot invalidate the Many Worlds Theory, can they? Many worlds, a most graceful answer to a most startling puzzle. The puzzle is as follows: the nature of the reality is quantum. But the same quantum system concurrently exist in many different states, as described by a wave function. An electron is both moving here and there, a radioactive atom is both decaying and not decaying, the Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead. Then suddenly the wave function collapses. Reality assumes a course and rejects all others. Now the electron is coming here, the atom has decayed, the cat is dead. What happened? Where did other possibilities go? How can they just be snuffed out like that? Why this state, this path, this form, and not that? The mind boggles at the randomness of reality. Then came along a young physicist named Hugh Everett III. His proposed solution? There is no randomness. If the world is faced with a choice between two courses of action, it is going to split itself into two and follow both. The election is moving here in one world and there in another. The cat is dead in this world and alive in that world. Anything that can happen will happen. Thus there is no place for regret. A wrong decision will be accompanied by a right one in some other world. You has done all the things you could have done. Choice, like time, is an illusion of a limited consciousness.

In another world, you did not go to that private screening and would never meet her, the promising actress. In another world, her tire did not leak, leaving you no pretext to drive her home. In another world, her hesitation when you leaned in resolved itself in a no instead of a yes and the two of you would bounce off each other like billiard balls. But you had it good, didn’t you? You did have it good for a while at least. Do you regret meeting her? Or do you regret her meeting him more? Would you like a world in which she never meets him, never did, never will, never knows such giddiness is possible, never knows how a person could dim all others like that, as the dawn make all stars vanish? You do understand how she felt, for she is such a person to you, but cruelly not vice versa; he is. You are merely an option, were a better option, a brighter star. But he is not an option. He is the fucking sun. Suppose you were in that other world where he simply did not exist—to you and her. But you knew about this world, this very world where because of him she is there and you are here, worlds apart. Would she still be the sun to you? Would a life haunted by unprovable, terrible suspicions be better than a moment of catastrophic clarity? The Many Worlds is infuriatingly mute with regard to this question.

You are now tempted to put all those worlds in the trash bin. Why can’t humans just accept what happened? Why so much wretched hankering for theoretical possibility of alternatives? Humans go to such trouble because they see themselves as protagonists in stories, agents of change. When everything goes awry they start asking, as you are doing now, seemingly sensible questions such as “What could I have done differently?”, “Where did it go wrong?”, as if they can travel back in time to nib the problem in the bud. But there is ultimately no real story, because there is no real protagonist, because there is no self, say the Buddhist philosophers. Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, declares, “This is not mine. This is not myself. This is not what I am.” For how can this be? There are, allegedly, strings vibrating, and strings constitute primary particles, and particles atoms, and atoms molecules, and molecules us, and at all levels the laws of physics hold, and many scientists suspect that if you look close enough, there is no matter, no “things,” just mathematical relations, “all is number” as the Pythagoreans gleefully puts it. Where does your agency, your free will lie in that picture? Where do you start and where do you end, for that matter? The monk Dharmakīrti writes very elegantly about the empty nature of all things: nothing exists over time, everything constantly changes into something else, a person is but a make-believe bunch of moments, and that very making-believing is the cause of your suffering. The past is fiction. The future is fiction. Choice is fiction. You are fiction.

So there it is. You, or what you now are, did not get resentful. You did not fester inside with resentment and rage. You did not hire shady private detectives to record them together and exposed them online. You did not manipulate the gullible public into bullying her and cancelling her career. You did not push her over the edge, leaving her the only sensible solution of killing herself. And you did not conspire to do all those things with me, her best friend and his wife, a star to her sun, a gazer at your sun.

Someone did. That someone is not you now. How long is a life? Let us together count not months but moments and broken dreams.