Louisville Process Theology Network

Time as a Circle

Apr 13, 2010

Alan Lightman?’s mystical novel, ?“Einstein?’s Dreams?”, observes the passage of time from various perspectives. We tend to think of time as minutes, hours, days and years, but time is much more interesting than that. Perhaps, Einstein dreamed about time in these many different ways while he was thinking through his seminal theories on relativity, space and time in 1905.


Time as a Circle, Page 8 --- ?“Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they make the same bargain again and again. Politicians do not know that they will shout the same lectern an infinite number of times. Parents treasure the first laugh from their child as if they will not hear it again ...

How would they know that each secret glimpse, each touch, will be repeated again and again and again exactly as before?

On Marketgasse, it is the same. How could the shopkeepers know that each handmade sweater, each embroidered handkerchief, each chocolate candy, each intricate compass and watch will return to their stalls?

... In the world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

So too every moment that two friends stop becoming friends, every time that a family is broken because of money, every vicious argument between spouses, every opportunity denied because of a superior?’s jealously, every promise not kept.

And just as all things will be repeated in the future, all things now happening happened a million times before. Some few people in town are vaguely aware that all has occurred in the past. These are people with unhappy lives, and they sense their misjudgments and wrong deeds and bad luck have all taken place in the previous loop of time.?”

To be continued in the next post.