Yesterday, today and tomorrow

I have a powerful sense of the importance of time, but I’m equally persuaded that any aspect or component of time can be equally important. We don’t just leave the past behind, and the fact that the future is so far unrealised does not prevent it from being important in our life now. At any moment we live suspended between memory and expectation, and both can be equally significant elements of our current experience. Today has been lived in this spirit.

I have had two messages from friends or family, alerting me to current political developments in the Balkans. Twenty years ago this was the fundamental material of my professional life, and I would have been the person ‘phoned by the BBC for comment on what is happening between Serbia and Montenegro. Now it all seems so very long ago. I know nothing and have no opinions worth hearing. How interesting to discover that some people still see me as inhabiting that framework! That particular “me” still inhabits their imagination, and still survives in the books on my shelves. As for the “me” who receives these messages, I am just glad that all that has been left behind.

It has been quite remarkable to discover that Christmas this year appears to have been brought forward! It is, perhaps, not surprising that although we are still in November, Christmas trees are on sale. What is surprising, however, is the fact that when my wife and I began to look for Christmas cards we discovered that all the ones that are not completely naff are sold out. I have decided to make my own instead, and made a good start on the design today. It is almost as if, deprived of the usual leisurely approach to the future (indeed, perhaps having no visible future beyond a continuation of the present) people are reaching forward to bring into the present the only future event that can be relied upon to take place. Assuredly there will be a Christmas! So all the rest of the possible future is sacrificed for the affirmation of that one event.

I escape from this craziness by relaxing into the present. The UK snooker championships have begun in Milton Keynes! In the here and now I can relax into the immediacy of each frame …. nay, each shot …. as it takes place.

All this rumination about time can be traced back, of course, to Henri Bergson’s thoughts on the matter, in his Time and Free Will, in which his principle concern is to attack the usual way of looking at time as if it is an extended linear dimension, like space. I don’t think, however, that blog postings are the best place in which to debate that rather complex question. I’m going to get back to the snooker.