Everything everywhere all at once
Time and its ruthless limitations don't always feel like gifts; but they can be if we let them
For the first time in half a decade, I’m in a period of relentless travel with no end in sight. By the end of this coming April, I’ll have flown on 31 different airplanes in the six-month period that began last November (yes, I counted). Practically all of this travel is for unquestionably good, joyful reasons — exciting work programs, weddings of dear friends, family visits, and the like. It’s a privilege to be able to do it; but for a homebody like me, this pace of travel is punishing no matter how I slice it.
But what if I could slice it? In the most efficient way possible, what if I could cut up the in-flight monotony and stack it all on top of each other, so that all those sky miles could accumulate not over months, but in a single instant?
“The Purpose of Time is to Prevent Everything from Happening at Once”
by X.J. Kennedy
Suppose your life a folded telescope Durationless, collapsed in just a flash As from your mother’s womb you, bawling, drop Into a nursing home. Suppose you crash Your car, your marriage — toddler laying waste A field of daisies, schoolkid, zit-faced teen With lover zipping up your pants in haste Hearing your parents’ tread downstairs — all one. Einstein was right. That would be too intense. You need a chance to preen, to give a dull Recital before an indifferent audience Equally slow in jeering you and clapping. Time takes its time unraveling. But, still, You’ll wonder when your life ends: Huh? What happened?
Originally published in Poetry Magazine, December 1997.
The title of this poem — “The Purpose of Time is to Prevent Everything from Happening at Once” — is actually a quotation that’s commonly misattributed1 to Albert Einstein. But even if Einstein was never quite this pithy, his achievements in physics reflected just this sentiment. He argued, for example, that “time” as we think of it doesn’t actually exist, at least in higher dimensions. “People like us who believe in physics,” he said, “know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
What Einstein meant was that we only experience time because we are only able to live in three dimensions. We can move around at our leisure on a three-dimensional sphere—Earth, for example—but we can only occupy a location in three dimensions2 at one time. I can visit my neglected office on Boise State’s campus, and I can also fly in an airplane to Austin to celebrate my dear friend’s bachelor party, but I can’t do both at the same exact time.
Time thus has its way with me in this instance, as it does with all of us. There’s no such thing, after all, as the poet’s “folded telescope” as a way to experience our lives—at least not yet.
The author of this poem, X.J. Kennedy, writes across time in his own way; he has said that he “write[s] for three separate audiences: children, college students (who use textbooks), and that small band of people who still read poetry.” I read and enjoy poets who tend to cater only to one of these three audiences. But Kennedy’s more expansive poetic mission reflects an approach to life and its happenings that I think we can learn a great deal from today.
This poem is a microcosm of this approach. Kennedy entertains, with a nip of humor and intrigue, the wild possibility of breaking Einstein’s rules and experiencing our complex lives as a singularity, one comprehensive instant where the telescope folds endlessly, and our birth and death are the same thing. We can grasp such a thing theoretically, but can’t, and will never, understand how this would happen in reality.
No doubt it would make some things easier. It sure would shorten those couple dozen layovers I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying recently. All of us have had the feeling, at one instant or another, of time standing still, crawling like molasses, refusing to move despite our best efforts to push it along, often with the help of meaningless distractions. We feel stuck, impatient, inefficient, and wasted like the time we’re watching tick away. In these interminable moments, letting it all slip away — quickly, unnoticed — would feel like a blessing.
The problem is that lately, it’s felt to me like time is doing just this: collapsing on top of itself at a relentless pace, even within our puny three dimensions. I submit as Exhibit A this screenshot I took of the New York Times homepage from a week or so ago:
What on earth am I supposed to do with this? I’m a person who has worked hard in my life to develop expertise in a number of these “LIVE” (all caps) crises unfolding ceaselessly and simultaneously before our eyes, and even I am absolutely paralyzed underneath the weight of it. I can’t reasonably hope to change any of these monstrosities individually, and I can only pray I make the smallest impact collectively. Certainly I can’t do so “Just Now”, a phrase plastered in red next to those headlines that can’t have any other purpose than to inject pure, uncut anxiety directly into my last nerve. This amount of world-rending information just wasn’t meant to be taken in all at once by one person. As I’ve said before, I’m more convinced all the time that we are evolutionarily incapable of consuming all of this stuff safely and healthily.
This apparently-permanent condition does, however, make me less surprised all the time that our culture is churning out film after film, show after show about time travel, multiverses, and the possibility of a multitude of unknowable words existing alongside each other simultaneously. Yes, it’s because the concept is cool and interesting, I won’t deny it. But it’s also because of the debilitating vertigo we’re all feeling in the one, actually-singular world we do inhabit: overwhelmed, beset, pressured to learn dutifully about; internalize; and then, of course, respond publicly to every new worldwide triumph or (more often, it seems) tragedy, almost regardless of the practical impact we can hope to have on it.
Instead of being constantly met with a new real-life “plotline” in a story that we’re supposed to have some creative control over, wouldn’t it be a mercy to just watch Loki chill and eat a nice honeycrisp apple in between dramatic, time-bending adventures? Or better yet, watch ourselves achieve such a complex feat as settling into mundanity for 15 uninterrupted minutes?
My wish, then, is not to speed time up so as to blow past the dull airplane rides. That probably-forgotten 2006 movie, Click—in which Adam Sandler’s unfortunate character acquires a magic remote that permits him to fast-forward through dull or uncomfortable moments in his life, to his great peril—tells us this much. Thankfully for, you know, art, Kennedy’s endearing poem accomplishes the same thing.
What I’ve tried to do instead is to enjoy, or at least inhabit, my multitude of flights more than I have before. That means treating them like the blessing that they are (or can be), hiding in plain sight.3 For one thing, they usually provide a kind of blissful solitude that can be hard to come by these days. For another, you can’t access the Internet without paying money to do so, something I’ve always refused to do, and always will. It’s sad that these conditions can only be met in a flying CO-2-spewing pressurized tube, but here we are.
If we could do it, it would be tempting to fast-forward through this stuff. Imagine the unread emails awaiting you on the other end! But this, Kennedy argues, would not only go beyond our tiny brains’ capacity for imagining; it would cheat us out of the crucial “small” moments of our daily lives, the ones that live behind and in between the little “special memory” videos Apple makes for you in the Photos app. We need, as Kennedy writes, “a chance to preen,” however ridiculously, even if it’s not central to the plot. After all, what’s a couple of dead hours confined to the middle seat on Delta 387 if not a “dull/Recital before an indifferent audience”?
Though he isn’t responsible for the quote in Kennedy’s poem, Einstein did actually determine that time is relative—in other words, the speed of time’s passage depends on your frame of reference. Among many other lessons, Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity tells us that (in simplistic terms) time moves faster for people traveling at faster speeds through space. What I take this to mean is that the faster I click through doomsday headline links on the NYT’s website, the faster the time in my day needlessly slips away.
This works the other way, too. I can’t be the only person who’s ever spent an accidental Sunday away from my phone and computer, only to find that the day seems to last a beautiful lifetime. Time on these days feels flexible, fungible, and infinite. In Kennedy’s words, it “takes its time unraveling” if you find yourself patient enough to let it. Forced to reckon with the world that’s actually in front of us, we obviously thrive and give our attention slowly and thoughtfully. Our reward: a lengthened perception of time itself.
In the end, our time, and its speed, is what we have. Einstein tells us pretty emphatically that there’s no actual choice in how fast time *actually* moves; but there’s plenty of choice — every day, and at every moment — in how we spend it. Yes, we’re restricted and limited by time thanks to that pesky friend of ours, physics; but the apparent straightjacket of time can also set us free if we let it.
Let’s stay on theme with some time-themed Place Picks.
Music
“Time We Made Time” by Watchhouse (Apple/Spotify)
Watchhouse (formerly known as Mandolin Orange) is a husband-and-wife duo comprising Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz. Their entire 2018 album, Tides of a Teardrop, is, in addition to a masterpiece, a beautifully lonely meditation on how to appreciate people and things fully before they’re gone. The passage of time causes these treasures to slip away; but across this album, and particularly in this song, the artist doubles back to make sure we’re acknowledging what’s happening so we can cherish them while they’re still here.
"I was toying with the idea of repressed emotion as a river that keeps swelling and swelling and eventually either running itself out or carrying you with it," Marlin said of the song in an interview with NPR’s All Songs Considered. "It can be very satisfying to give into the rage and destructive power of it.”
Books
“Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel
I have a strong feeling this won’t be a new recommendation to quite a few of you, who I’m betting have read, or at least heard of, Mandel’s classic Station Eleven (or else watched the excellent HBO adaptation of it). This book exists in the same universe as Station Eleven and her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, but incorporates elements of time travel, destiny, and regret that — for me — make it her most powerful novel yet. It’s my favorite book of the last five years, and if you’ve been saving it for a special occasion, I hope you find that occasion soon.
The real source appears to be a short science-fiction story from 1921 by Ray Cummings called “The Time Professor”, which God-willing is what they’ll start calling me once I get tenure next year.
Forward and backward; side-to-side; and up-and-down. Or, if you prefer: length, width, and height.
Took every ounce of my being not to write “hiding in *plane* sight”
This column was better read twice, the second time the next day. I missed a lot the first time! Agree on big shout out to Emily St. John Mandel from a reader who rarely deigns to read anything containing the least element of fantasy. She’s a wonder.
To spend 'an accidental Sunday away from my phone and computer, only to find that the day seems to last a beautiful lifetime' is just what I look forward to. Glad you get the occasional Sundays like this, Charlie. This post puts me in mind to better enjoy those airport moments...