We have seen that one of the unique characteristics of man is that he can stand outside his present time and imagine himself ahead in the future or back in the past. A general, in planning a battle next week or next month, anticipates in fantasy how the enemy will react if attacked here or what will happen when the artillery opens up there; and thus he can prepare his army as nearly as possible for every danger by going through the battle in imagination days or weeks before it occurs. Or a speaker in preparing an important address can—and if he is sensible he does—call to mind other times when he has given a similar speech. He reviews how the audience reacted, what parts of the address were successful and which were not, what attitude on his part was most effective and so on. By re-enacting the event in imagination, he learns from the past how better to meet the present.
This power to “look before and after” is part of man’s ability to be conscious of himself. Plants and animals live by quantitative time: an hour, a week or a year past, and the tree has another ring on its trunk. But time is a quite different thing for human beings; man is the time-surmounting mammal. In his works on semantics, Alfred Korzybski has insistently made the point that the characteristic which distinguishes man from all other living things is his time-binding capacity. By that, says Korzybski, “I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present. . . . I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity.”*
Psychologically and spiritually, man does not live by the clock alone. His time, rather, depends on the significance of the event. Yesterday, let us say, a young man spent an hour traveling on the subway each way to his work, eight hours on his relatively uninteresting job, ten minutes after work talking to a girl he has recently fallen in love with and dreams of marrying, and two hours in the evening at an adult education class. Today he remembers nothing of the two hours on the subway—it was an entirely empty experience, and he, as is the practice of many people, had closed his eyes and tried to sleep, that is to suspend time until the trip was over. The eight hours on the job made only a little impression on him; of the evening class he can recall a little more. But the ten minutes with the girl occupies him most of all. He had four dreams that night—one about his class, and three about the girl. That is to say, the ten minutes with the girl takes up more “room-space” than twenty hours in the rest of the day. Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time as such, but the meaning of the experience, that is, what is significant for the person’s hopes, anxiety, growth.
Or take a thirty-year-old adult’s memories of his childhood. During the year when he was five, thousands of events happened to him. But now at thirty he can recall only three or four—the day when he went to play with his friend and the friend ran off with an older child, or the instant that morning when he saw the new tricycle under the Christmas tree, or the night his father came home drunk and struck his mother, or the afternoon his dog got lost. This is all he can recall but, interestingly enough, he remembers this handful of events which occurred twenty-five years ago more vividly than ninety-nine per cent of the events that occurred just yesterday. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have a flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitative significance of our experiences.
This does not mean that quantitative time can be ignored: we have simply pointed out that we do not live by such time alone. Man is always part-and-parcel of the natural world, involved in nature at every point; we will rarely live over seventy or eighty years no matter what we think about it. We get old, or we get tired if we work too long at a stretch, and we cannot escape the necessity of being realistic about the clock and calendar. Man dies like every other form of life. But he is the animal who knows it and can foresee his death. By being aware of time, he can control and use it in certain ways.
The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, that he is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, he works not by choice but by compulsion, the more he is then the object of quantitative time. He is the servant of the time clock or whistle; he teaches such and such number of classes per week or punches so many rivets per hour, he feels bad or good depending on whether it is Monday and the beginning of a work week or Friday and the end; he gauges his rewards or lack of them on the scale of how much time he puts in. The more conformist and unfree he is, the more time is the master. He “serves time,” as the amazingly accurate expression has it for being in jail. The less alive a person is—“alive” here defined as having conscious direction of his life—the more is time for him the time of the clock. The more alive he is, the more he lives by qualitative time.
“A man who lives intensely really lives,” as E. E. Cummings says, “but a man who lives to be 120 doesn’t necessarily live at all. You say ‘I lived a whole lifetime in a moment’—a cliché that’s true, and, vice versa, one takes a long train ride and it’s a stinking bore. You read detective stories to kill time. If time were any good why kill it?”
I think it was C. G. Jung who said, accurately enough, that a person is afraid of growing old to the extent that he is not really living now. Hence it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about growing old is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive.
But, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening “void.” On the everyday level this is shown in the fear of boredom. Man, as Erich Fromm has said, “is the only animal who can be bored”—and in that short sentence lies great import. Boredom is the “occupational disease” of being human. If a man’s awareness of the passage of time tells him only that the day comes and goes and winter follows autumn and that nothing is happening in his life except hour succeeding hour, he must desensitize himself or else suffer painful boredom and emptiness. It is interesting that when we are bored, we tend to go to sleep—that is, to blot out consciousness, and become as nearly “extinct” as possible.