Louisville Process Theology Network

Time as a Quality

Apr 20, 2010

From Page 123 --


?“Suppose that time is not a quantity but a quality, like the luminescence of the night above the trees just when a rising moon has touched the treeline. Time exists, but it cannot be measured.

Just now, on a sunny afternoon, a woman stands in the middle of Bahnhofplatz, waiting to meet a particular man. Some time ago, he saw her on the train to Fribourg, was entranced, and asked to take her to the Grosse Schanze gardens. From the urgency in his voice and the look in his eyes, the woman knew that he meant soon.

So, she waits for him, not impatiently, passing the time with a book. Some time later, perhaps on the following day, he arrives, they lock arms, walk to the gardens, stroll by the groupings of tulips, roses, martagon lilies, alpine columbines, sit on a white cedar bench for an un-measurable time.

Evening comes, marked by a change in the light, a reddening of the sky. The man and the woman follow a winding path of a small white stones to a restaurant on a hill. Have they been together a lifetime, or only a moment? Who can say? . . .

In a world where time cannot be measured, there are not clocks, no calendars, no definite appointments. Events are triggered by other events, not by time.

A house is begun with stone and lumber arrive at the building site. The stone quarry delivers stone when the quarryman needs money. . . Trains leave the station at Bahnhofplatz when the cars are filled with passengers.

In a world where time is a quality, events are recorded by the color of the sky, the tone of the boatman?’s call on the Aare, the feeling of happiness or fear when a person comes into a room.

The birth of a baby, the patent of an invention; the meeting of two people are not fixed points in time, held down by hours and minutes. Instead, events glide through the space of the imagination, materialized by a look, a desire.

Likewise, the time between two events is long or short, depending on the background of contrasting events, the intensity of illumination, the degree of light and shadow, the view of the participants.?”