Time Reversibility Pt. 2
Thursday, January 9
From Greg Iles’ The Quiet Game:
Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity… Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.
I wrote yesterday of the B theory of time, which takes the past to be equally real as the present moment.
Even you disagree — if you’re drawn to A-theories, for example — the past is a necessary concept to understand the present. In that way, it’s just like how selfhood is a useful, even if fundamentally unreal, concept, without which it’s difficult to understand our place in the world.
We’d be hard-pressed to understand the present without admitting the reality of the past, and hard-pressed to change it without admitting our distinction from the past.