A Meditation on Time, Memory, with Some Thoughts on Thomas Hardy

Time is real, as real as your breast pocket. We are travelling with tremendous speed toward the End of all things finite.

There was a time in my life when I thought love to be unreal, a wonderful illusion, a lie we tell ourselves just to feel good. It is not surprising that a lot of people think the same of time—the flying thing. Antiphon the Sophist considered it unreal; Parmenides thought it to be an illusion. Ancient Indians had the concept of The Wheel of Time, of time being cyclical, turning and turning back on itself, a marvelous repetition, a gorgeous loop—ages slide away and return again. Hence the idea of rebirth and reincarnation. The Igbo and the Yoruba also appear to believe this. Chigozie Obioma’s Booker Prize-longlisted novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, based on Igbo cosmology, narrated by a Chi, dramatizes—in a sprawling poetic, sometimes excessive language—how the spirits of the dead return as either children or as chi’s, in their own time. Names in Yoruba also deeply imply this presupposition: Babawale, father returns home, suggesting that a dead father has returned as his son’s son; and Yetunde, the feminine equivalent. (My translation is feeble.)

But time is real, as real as your breast pocket; and linear. To paraphrase Brecht, we are travelling with tremendous speed toward the End of all things [finite]. We are not beating back and forth in the same dance like a mechanical ball. We are not time either, as some believe, we are an eternity resident within time; every human being is at their core infinite. This is the Judeo-Christian worldview. Time itself is not infinite (Old English tima from the Proto-Germanic timon, from the Proto-Indo-European root da, meaning “to divide”: that it can be divided implies that it can be measured; the infinite is immeasurable), nor is the universe—it has a fundamental time as a part of its structure, which we experience, as Newton asserted, on a relative level, in the way that events unfold for us; and events come to be by the motion of objects. What we do or don’t do determine how we perceive time.

Borges’s dubious and disturbing short story “The Book of Sand”, which takes up the subject of time and infinity, comes to mind. A man buys a book that came from India that is at once crazy and exciting, infinite in its words and images; the Book seems indestructible. It appears to me that we are the Book of Sand; because not only do we contain an infinity that cannot be ruined (the spirit), we also contain an infinite capacity for language, and for knowing. Our image memory is beyond vast, able to permutate and hybridize and breed without cease. We can remember, we can dream.

Borges, in The Last Interview and Other Conversations he had with Richard Burgin, said something interesting and remarkable about memory, an idea he claimed belonged to his father, who was a lawyer and a professor of psychology. In fact he was directly quoting his father: “I think that if I recall so

mething, for example, if today I look back on this morning, then I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight, I’m thinking back on this morning, then what I’m really recalling is not the first image, but the first image in memory. So that every time I recall something, I’m not recalling it really, I’m recalling the last time I recalled it, I’m recalling my last memory of it.” 

This idea of memory conceptualizes for me the twenty-seven Thomas Hardy poems in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, selected by Philip Larkin. The poems, several whose orientation is time and memory, are not remembrances, but rather remembrances of what is remembered. Hardy did not write about what happened in the past, as about what he remembered of what he remembered to have happened in that time: retaining but “the phantom”, he “urges my unsight/ To conceive my lost prize.” Think of a print of an acheiropoietic print, with the memory as the divine touch, the poet as the touched, and the printed print as the poem. (A short story that digs this concept is Alice Munro’s “What Is Remembered”.) One gets the feeling, too, that he is making things up. Thus Hardy’s poetic thinking could be revisional and reorientating. Reorientating because he works out of memory into the enthralling fastastical—which thoroughly excites me.

The love poem ‘On the Departure Platform’, beginning with a kiss at the barrier, paints the way a moment (in memory) fades: “She left me, and moment by moment got/ Smaller and smaller, until to my view/ She was but a spot.” ‘After a Journey’ is a fantastic invention: the persona is drawn by “a voiceless ghost” who succeeds in drawing out the song from him [the persona]—

“I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you. . .

I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

To the spots we knew when we haunted here together. . .”

‘After’ is not griefy; the past is not a wound here. However some of the poems carry regret, and a pain that is the consequence of the irretrievable: a beautiful moment gone (‘The Mound’, ‘This Summer and Last’), old age and the evolved body (‘An Anniversary’), and death (‘Where the Picnic Was’, ‘The Sunshade’). There’s also a wonderful elegiac ode to the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, marked by Hardy’s quiet but softening humor, which is a stamp on the poems.

Borges mentions, in the same interview—and this matter has puzzled minds throughout the ages—a theologian who said all things were possible for God to do except undoing the past. In response, also from Borges, Oscar Wilde said that “Christianity made that [undoing the past] possible because if a man forgave another he was undoing the past. I mean, if you have acted wrongly and that act is forgiven you, then the deed is undone.” 

Definitely. In the person of Christ we find the past undone. “The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything,” “the Spinner of the Years” (Hardy’s phrases) steps into time to give forgiveness to all mankind throughout time that they might be free. A profound Christian truth, of course, but it is also central to how we interact with reality: without forgiveness we cannot progress from chaos into order. Man must be forgiven and must forgive in order to enter a new Epoch.

This concept was known in the previous ages. The word from which time derives is the same from which “tide” comes. The association of time with water signifies a flow, an ebb, but also a cleansing. Noah’s age closed with water, birthing a new. The Ancient Egyptian civil year was marked by the cyclic movements of the Nile: the Akhet was the time of its flooding, when it refreshed the earth; Peret was when the people planted; and the last, the harvest season, was Shemu. They knew, but could not activate the cleansing in their intercouse with reality: just as we can’t without a strengthening grace.

Outside the window of my room in Ikorodu, where I spent my holiday, a particular bird, at a little past midnight, every night, would start to beep—a beep every split second. The beeping always sounded like a mechanical “Please. Please.” Sometimes it would quicken. As if tired of pleading, it would fall quiet. Now I wonder what it knew about time, and about what it was seeking forgiveness. What about memory kept it up, crying and crying, every cold night? You cannot know, and should not bother—this is the River Bird’s response to the boy in that succinct, characteristic JP Clark poem, ‘Streamside Exchange’. And I agree. But this Hardy intends for you, dear pilgrim, and me to know, “Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going,/ Gentlemen.”