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"Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river," Borges wrote. "Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience. And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: "It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it." A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."  Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.) Not knowing what to do with the time we have been given, not knowing how to hold time in our personal and political lives, is at bottom an act of forgetting how time hold us. Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) casts a spell against forgetting in the fourth canto of his long poem "Morning,":  You will remember that whimsical ravine
where the vibrant aromas rose,
and from time to time a bird dressed
in water and languor: winter's garment.
You will remember those gifts from the earth:
piquing fragrance, gold clay,
thickets of herbs, wild roots,
bewitching thorns like swords. You will remember the bouquet you brought,
a bouquet of shadow and silent water,
a bouquet like foam-covered stone. And that time was like never and always:
We go where nothing is expected
and find everything waiting there.
 Pablo Neruda If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have "touched time," reverenced the minute for how it is "bound to join the river of time that bears us," reverenced "the inexhaustible springs of time," longed for "a time complete as an ocean," then made that ocean with his poetry. In his poem "The Enigmas," composed during WWII, he writes: You've asked me what the crustacean spins
between its gold claws
and I reply: the sea knows. You wonder what the sea squirt waits for in its transparent bell?
What does it wait for? I'll tell you: it's waiting for time like you.
A decade later, in one of his "Elemental Odes," Neruda laid out his most explicit instruction for how to hold time: Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.
Couple with three poems for trusting time, then revisit Kahlil Gibran on how to befriend time. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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This essay is adapted from Traversal.  We feel first and think second, then spend our lives contorting to invert the order, sublimating emotion to reason, only to find ourselves made smaller and less alive by the flight from feeling.
The mind has peculiar way of protecting the heedless heart from breaking, a way of damming an impossible love from flooding in through a bramble of reasons and rationalizations, persuading the possessed person that the ebullient joy of the other's company, the creative and intellectual invigoration, the ecstasy of understanding flowing between the two, must be an undiscovered species of friendship or admiration or some other unhazardous substance of affection. But against a force of joy strong enough, against an invigoration ecstatic enough, the dam eventually gives way, and the uncontrollable rapids of eros rush in. That is how people of high intelligence and sensitivity, people of otherwise exceptional self-awareness, often fail to realize — refuse to let themselves realize — that they are falling in love with someone unavailable or inadvisable until they wake up one day suffused with an all-pervading love, suffocated by the impossibility of its actualization… too late to press the gauze of reason against the exit wound of love.  The Human Heart. One of French artist Paul Sougy's mid-century scientific diagrams of life. (Available as a print.) And still, and still, to have given love in all of its confusions and complexities and possible catastrophes a real chance is the only antidote to the greater wound, the pain that so poisons a life — the melancholy of the chance not taken. In the aftermath of it all, it takes a superhuman sobriety of spirit to look back on any genuine but unrealized love without the revisionist, survivalist impulse to dismiss it as a hallucination of the heart, for there is no greater hallucination than the rationalization we mistake for reason.  Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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In August 1905, while Mina Hubbard was mapping Labrador in her pioneering expedition, the Brooklyn Eagle reported one of the most "remarkable exploits in Arctic work" — a relief expedition to rescue the American explorer Anthony Fiala and his crew, who had been stranded in the icy expanse for nearly two years, attempting to reach the North Pole. Bankrolled by the American industrialist William Ziegler, who had made his fortune on baking powder and vowed to spend it on funding as many efforts as it takes to reach the North Pole, Fiala's three-masted ship was crushed by polar ice just four months after sailing from Norway. Although the America could no longer sail, the ice was so think that the ship didn't sink but froze in place.  The America in its icy clench. The men scrambled to salvage the cargo, but when another storm finally swallowed the wreck in January, most of their provisions and coal vanished with it. They fled onto the ice cap, built a camp, and undertook the daily task of survival, but not before erecting an observatory and setting up all of their scientific instruments. The days bled into weeks, into months, into seasons as they kept hoping for rescue. The few remaining provisions ran out. They subsisted on walrus and bear. All the while, they kept making observations. It kept their spirits from sinking, this stubborn, steadfast work of painting a portrait of that alien world in numbers and figures in order to reveal the full face of this one. In what seems like a miracle in the history of polar exploration, only one of the thirty-five men would die in the twenty months they spent as captives of the ice.  The Ziegler expedition at latitude 82°N, March 1905 Although their time in the Arctic was relegated to the sidelines of history as a failed expedition by the measure of its patron's stated goal of reaching the North Pole, I see it as a triumph of both science and the human spirit. While conquest is a finite game, played for the pleasure of the win, curiosity is an infinite game, played for the pleasure of finding things out, in Richard Feynman's lovely phrase. Exploration in the service of learning is always far greater and more enduring than exploration in the service of at staking a flag in the name of a potentate, for the task of knowledge is unfinishable and endlessly rewarding. ("The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power!" wrote the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell the year Anthony Fiala was born. "We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.") Two years after their rescue, the expedition's chief scientist — William J. Peters, whose groundbreaking studies of geomagnetism shaped the present understanding of Earth's magnetosphere — published a 630-page report of their scientific findings. Fiala himself wrote the introduction, urging the reader to imagine the conditions, unimaginable to most of us, under which the work was done — a beckoning that feels like a miniature manifesto for the animating spirit of science: The difficulties encountered in the execution of work in the Polar Regions must be experienced in order to be properly appreciated. Storms are frequent in the winter, and observers, in going to and from observatories and instrument shelters, have often to crawl upon hands and knees in the face of high winds, whirling snow particles, low temperatures, and in the darkness of winter. The hearty and unselfish cooperation of all concerned is amply indicated by the execution of the great amount of detail work that is reported upon in this volume.
Among the endless tables of astronomical, meteorological, and tidal data is a series of meticulous observations of the aurora borealis spanning several months — a landmark contribution to the poetic science of our planet's most magical phenomenon. Three of the nights — December 23, 1903, January 2, 1904, and January 23, 1904 — appear as a series of breathtaking plates that capture both the drama and its subtlety of the Northern Lights.  Aurora borealis, December 23, 1903  Aurora borealis, January 2, 1904  Available as a print.  Aurora borealis, January 23, 1903  Aurora borealis sequence, January 23, 1903. Available as a print and a clock. Couple with Frederick Cook's moving account of surviving the icy captivity of the other pole, then revisit the science of how the aurora borealis casts its spell. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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