The Last Word On Nothing

Call no man happy until he is dead. The phrase is a bit like an optical illusion: its meaning depends on the psychological topography of the person who is looking at the words. Some people see: “Life is suffering that only ends when you are dead”. Others see: “Even if things are good now, the next calamity could always be just around the corner”.

I was thinking about this ambiguity when I was at a funeral a couple of months ago. The officiant gave a narrative of her life that was as pruned and artificial as a Bonsai tree. It was also the last word: there was no more experience ahead for her, no more data points to plot into adjusted conclusions. After he was done, we all sat in silence in the little chapel, looking back on her life.

Time is hard to think about. Beyond the immediate present and past, its sheer abstractness means the concept oozes from our grasp. I just wrote “grasp” because the physical metaphor is all I have to hold the concept of time in any focus.

That temptation seems to be universal. Most cultures don’t know how to talk about time without resorting to spatial metaphors. It’s why we think of the future as being in front of us and the past as something we have put behind us. As the anthropologist Chris Sinha once wrote in New Scientist:

Space and time seem to be closely related domains of human cognition, if the way we talk about them is a reliable guide. We speak of events occurring in relation to temporal landmarks, in the same way that we locate objects in relation to spatial landmarks. So an event can take place in the summer or on Friday.

In rare cases, the metaphor can flip. Some cultures don’t think of the future as being in front of them but behind them. This makes sense too. You can’t “see” the things that haven’t happened yet, they are still a veiled mystery. Whereas the past – which is known because it has already happened, and can be picked through for memories and error correction and reference – is laid out in front of us.

Intriguingly, there is one tribe that doesn’t use any spatial metaphors at all, with the consequence that they don’t talk much about time, period.

For the Amondawa, time during the day is marked by the sun’s position in the sky, and by activities such as rising, eating and working that habitually take place at different times. With no words for month and year, longer intervals are named as subdivisions of the dry and rainy seasons. The language has no abstract term for time, and when asked to translate the Portuguese word tempo, speakers use the word kuara, or sun.

Our hypothesis is that, because they have no calendar or other number-based time-measurement system, the Amondawa have no corresponding concept of “abstract” time. Their time intervals are structured around the rhythms of the natural and social world, rather than being segments of a calibrated timeline independent of and superimposed upon these worlds.

I wonder what life was like when we all lived a bit more like this. Most of our metaphorical frameworks around time came from the extraordinary industrial infrastructure on which our modern civilisation runs. Standardised time zones gave us reliable railroads; atomic clocks gave us GPS. 

On the train back home from the funeral, I sat in my preferred kind of seat, facing rear. I know a lot of people who hate a rear facing seat. But I find them so much more comfortable. Instead of feeling like my eyes are constantly being ripped forward and forward and forward by the merciless beat of oncoming events, I can relax into the receding scenery.

We have built up metaphors that allow us to stretch our minds to consider things we could never conceive of in the deep past. I can’t help wondering how much anxiety and depression that is responsible for. We can think about the end of our lives, we can think about the end of the solar system, we can think about the end of the universe.

The concept in time we seem to have become unmoored from – and around which entire meditation and psychology industries have consequently been built – is “now”. If we could find our way to a full understanding of that place in time, would it be possible to simply call a man happy at the moment he was happy, and call it a day?

Image credit: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Cfbartolotta23