Carlos Eire on Time and Eternity

Tell me about your first book, St Augustine’s Confessions.

St Augustine is a good place to start because this is the oldest book that I have chosen. It was written between AD397 and AD398. St Augustine of Hippo was one of the first thinkers to struggle with the concepts of time, memory and eternity. The Confessions is the first real autobiography ever written and it has a very strong philosophical and psychological dimension. One of his obsessions in the book is looking at memory. He tries to remember his past life and to figure out how it is that the past and present and future are related, and especially how the past stays in his memory even though it has ceased to be. 

And this struggle leads him to the question of eternity – how it is that we are somehow already in eternity. But we only experience it sequentially one little bit at a time. Augustine is the very first person to try to dissect time and in one chapter he comes up with the insight that the present really doesn’t exist because the present is ever moving and by the time you say the word now and get to the last letter it is no longer now. So his take on it as a philosopher, and also by that time as a Christian theologian, is that the only real time is eternity. For human beings our minds and wills, every part of us is programmed not to live eternally, and time for him ends up being a great disappointment.

Your next book is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. 

This book is at the other end of the spectrum – written in the 20th century. Kurt Vonnegut, through fiction, takes up the same questions as Augustine all those centuries before. He is also looking at the relationship between the present moment and what had happened before. And then he takes it one step further than Augustine to look at the future. His main character, Billy Pilgrim, is constantly unstuck in time. He is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. And the alien’s experience of time is very different to the earthling’s experience of time. They experience time almost as if it was a mountain range. It is just there. Everything that happens is there and solid. And on earth human beings can see just whatever moment they are in. But, Billy Pilgrim has the ability to do what the Tralfamadorians can do. He can transcend time.

What I find intriguing about all this is that Vonnegut tried so many times to write the story of his memories of the bombing of Dresden and he kept failing. And, finally with Slaughterhouse Five, he wrote this outrageous story about time travel. That was his way of getting to grips with the horror that he lived with. His character Billy Pilgrim lives through the bombing of Dresden and he goes back and forth to Tralfamadore. There is one beautiful bit where he describes how Billy Pilgrim experienced the bombing of Dresden backwards. The bombs fly up to the airplane, then they go back to the factory and the parts go to the places where the parts came from and eventually back to the mines where the metal is mined. And all this is seen in slow motion. 

Even though he is no philosopher Vonnegut is still able to ask the questions that all of us think about – how time affects our lives.

Let’s move on to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. 

This is another novelist and a lot of the book is not about time and eternity. It is more about human relationships. But Kundera does keep picking up the question of human existence in time. The title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, comes from the main character’s obsession with the fact that all we have is the now, nothing else except the ever moving now. He wants to know what is happening about our existence in relation to the ephemeral present, which comes and goes so quickly. Since we are stuck in this ever-moving moment, how do the past and future relate to that, and what difference do moral choices make over a lifetime? What is the meaning of our existence? We are stuck in this ever-moving moment, and how does the past relate to that? 

One meditation in there is where he takes up Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return – an ancient Hindu concept – in which everything that happens continues to happen eternally, an infinite number of times, over and over, like a broken record. And then when he considers that he asks himself whether Nietzsche was serious about this, and what difference it would make if he was right. He says, yes life is meaningless because you have no way to get out of this cycle. It is hell because all the bad things will happen again. And he puts it this way: if every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect… There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off heads.

Kundera was living in Czechoslovakia at the time of Soviet occupation.