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TWO

The Myth of Time

From the Valley of the Kings to Silicon Valley

For it is important to underline this fact,

that it is, above all, by analyzing the attitude of

modern man toward Time that we can penetrate

the disguises of his mythological behavior.

—MIRCEA ELIADE, The Sacred and the Profane

I have been haunted all my life by a strange dream. I am wandering through a dark castle at night and hear a peculiar sound that compels me to descend ancient stone steps to a shadow-strewn room where three bent figures beckon me. I step closer and see three old crones at a cobwebbed spinning wheel shaped like a wispy clock. One of the crones spins golden thread, another measures it and weaves it into hands for the clock, the third stands poised with scissors ready to sever the timely threads, I gaze at them, realizing they are the Three Fates deciding how much time will be allotted to some unsuspecting soul.

Watching, I wonder, What am I doing here?

Then an icy voice whispers in my ear, What were you waiting for?

Again and again, for the last thirty years, I have been alternately stricken and blessed with this dream. Always the same question that feels like something between an accusation and a challenge; always the same sensation that wizened hands are trying to squeeze the air out of my lungs as the ambiguous words hover in the air.

“Why are you squandering your time?” the mournful voice is asking me. “When are you going to get on with your life?”

In the silence between the sleepstrange tones I hear a chorus of voices that have merged into one over time: my father, my track coach, the parish priest, Basho, Blake, Emerson and Thoreau, Neruda and Kerouac, and countless others who live inside me. A medley of bittersweet sources of instigation and inspiration, all contributing to the lifelong battle with time in my soul.

These dreams are no mere random firings of the synapses. The primordial scene with the tenuous thread of time is my soul talking in images. What I am trying to do is see and listen, and do as the psychologist Rollo May advises: “Identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you.” So I try to savor the image, like I would an image from a work of art, letting it simmer in my imagination, and allowing the meaning to unfold.

The dream of the Three Fates represents my life, rife with all its glorious threads that turn to knots in my soul. It expresses the vital force within me that is trying to remind me of something recently forgotten, something crucial. Yet, because the dream tends to appear to me during periods of massive anxiety, I wonder if it is the cockamamie voice of conscience that I hear in the dream or the voice of a god? Whatever the source, it feels crucial that I understand it, whether it is pressing on me like a mental hairshirt to work harder, or as a gentle nudge reminding me to revel in the gift of my very life.

Moreover, the harsh truth revealed by the dream is that time itself is the heart of my personal myth. It tells me how difficult it is for me to live the life I believe I am supposed to be leading. Where that imperious “supposed to” comes from I don't know, but in my more optimistic moods it feels like a sense of destiny, the force behind my character, what the Greeks called the daimon. I listen, waiting, as the dream says, trying to learn how to use the time that has been allotted to me, trying to unravel the knots that tie me up like Gulliver in Lilliputia.

I'm only too aware of the noble sentiments from the East exhorting me to live in the moment, “the miracle of the present moment,” as the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls it. But I'm pulled in two different directions: into the past by my fascination for history, and toward the future by my interest in what's next, from my own next projects to the next innovations from Silicon Valley. I feel caught, like a character in an Italo Calvino short story, between two myths, attempting to make time go backward and forward simultaneously, while rejoicing in the vertigo that I try to use like adrenaline.

For thirty years now, since my college days when I worked the night shift in a Detroit factory, I've lived under a regimen of four or five hours of sleep a night, as if a character right out of a Greek tragedy who is relentlessly driven by Ananke, the goddess of need and necessity, who also was a spinner of the thread of fate. I've come to recognize this as one of the plot lines of my own personal myth. As with all true myths, the story has a ferocious drive to it. It compels me to believe I need to steal time, borrow moments, stretch my hours, dilate my days, whenever and wherever possible, and because of this daily practice I often have the sense of having already led several lives. But still the great dragon doubt breathes fire down my neck, reminding me that life is too short to be merely marking time. While stealthily borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, as my Grandma Dora used to say, I've hoped I was making time where there was little or none before, a task formerly reserved for gods alone.

But because of my lifelong accelerated pace I have always run the risk of being just one more guy caught up in the crank-it-up, take-no-prisoners, racing-to-relax times, the trying-not-to-get-ticketed-by-the-cosmic-cops-in-the-speed-trap times. Often, I have fretted over whether time is living me rather than me living time. The sudden swings between memorable time and forgettable time can be wrenching; the difference between lost time and found time can change your life.

So it's been imperative for me to try to practice the art of slowing down, recalling with affection Thoreau's dictum, “When in doubt, move slowly.” Every day I try being as alert as possible to the miracle of the world around me. The hard work allows me the extra time for my family, music, a ballgame, a walk in the woods, a languorous meal, time to travel, but unless I slow down and savor the time the experiences have no clarity, no depth, no meaning, and hauntingly enough, there may not be any memory of them at all.

“It's a question of balance,” as the Moody Blues sang back in the time warp of the 1960s. It's also a question of myth.

“Where did the time go?” we say with rapscallion laughter after a great conversation, good party, gentle lovemaking. We also ask where it went at the end of our days, and with raking pathos if we really don't know.

“So little done, so much to do,” bemoaned Cecil Rhodes on his deathbed.

“Bring back my youth,” cried John Walcott in his final hours.

“But I have so little time,” said composer Alban Berg.

Time is the soul of myth, as myth is the heart of time.

The Clock on the Wall

There is an old legend from the Salish Indians of North America about the trickster character Mink, in which we hear echoes of a situation that is curiously contemporary. In this wisdom tale we find a potent image that speaks directly to the soul's deep concern for time.

Long ago the People lived in accord with the rhythms of the sun and the moon, the stars and the tides, day and night, light and darkness. Then strangers from a faraway land appeared. The People called them their European guests. Of all their curious customs and possessions there was one that neither the trickster Mink nor the People had ever thought about before: an odd and seemingly useless thing the guests called Time. But soon Mink learned it was great medicine, it had wondrous power.

Mink decided he had to get some for himself.

One night he broke into the house of the strangers and discovered that they stored their Time in a gleaming box. Mink thought that the noise from the magic box sounded like woodpeckers in the forest, and that the two thin arrows on its face that moved around and around looked like birds circling around and around without ever really going anywhere. But he was impressed with the reverence the Guests gave the box and the way they looked at it throughout the day and night. Carefully, Mink tucked the ticking box under his arm and snuck away.

Now for the first time the People had Time. But it proved to be a nettlesome gift. Mink found himself mesmerized by the moving arrows inside the box and became forgetful about when he was supposed to do things he knew before by second nature. Now Mink checked out the clock before he did anything, just like his Guests. He even decided he should wear a turnkey around his neck so he would always be ready to wind up the machine and keep it ticking.

No sooner did Mink learn to tell Time than he no longer had any for himself. He spent so much time looking at the clock, he could never find the spare moments to fish or hunt or play like he used to do. Instead of being free to wake up and sleep when it was natural, Mink began to rely on the clock to tell him when to rise and when to rest. Soon he began to work more and more and rest less and less.

Lo and behold, as the wise commentator, Joseph Bruchac, has noted, “Because Mink stole Time, it now owned him and the People. It has been that way every since. Time owns us the way we used to own the Sun.”

Stolen Moments