I believe we should take a moment every so often to consider the two most telling aspects of our existence: Where and when, or place and time.
You’re thinking, “Don’t you mean Minkowski space or Einstein’s Spacetime? And what about matter and energy? You know that E= mc^2 formula everyone knows? You think you know more than the physicists? Humbly, I’ll say, “No, I don’t know more, but for everyone matter and energy always exist in some ‘place’ at some definite time.”
What Is Place?
By “place” I mean any part of the Cosmos that has affected humans directly or indirectly or that has been affected by humans or human consciousness. “Place” is space that has a history of meaning: Your neighborhood, the Gettysburg battlefield on which the fate of a nation was determined or the waters off Midway where the 1942 battle doomed the Japanese to defeat within a matter of minutes, the Acropolis that symbolizes an epitome of human intellectual achievement, or the location you associate with some success or failure. Place is personal—on both an individual and a collective basis. Although I have never visited it, I have a relationship with the Sea of Tranquility born from my watching Armstrong and Aldrin bounce over its surface. I might say the same for sites the Mars rovers tracked and photographed and for the black hole Sagittarius A that astronomers imaged with the Event Horizon Telescope and the technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Through the eyes of others and through technology many locations throughout the Cosmos have become “places” for me.
It’s place that generates deja vu, place that encapsulates a time in your past. Every place has character that is a combination of a physical environment and an experience within that environment. Let me emphasize: Place is more than its physical attributes. In fact, we recognize some places for the experiences of many who preceded us. It isn’t just the physicality of the site, it’s what happened or happens there both in reality and in imagination, or what we anticipate to happen like a good time at the beach, a win at the slots, or a victory over a rival school on the home team’s field. All places have “character,” but some seem somehow to have a richer character, and among those are the places in our personal histories. Ambience isn’t estranged from time; it is time’s safety deposit box. You can revisit a time only because you have a key to the box in your brain’s vault. The key to place is the key to time.
That place embodies personal time is important to me. As the frontispiece of this website asks, “Can you think of ten minutes ago without thinking of place?”
It is this question that drove me to assume a priority of place over time in the human mind. “When I was in elementary school”; “When I was in high school”; “When I had my first job”: All these and similar statements, such as “When I was ten…” conjure images of you in some place, in some physical circumstance. Even if you have experienced one of those rare “out-of-body” moments, you still localize it.”* Every such psychedelic or hallucinogenic experience occurs “in a place,” often seen from a hovering position: You as a drone looking down on you as a person in a place. Think actress Shirley MacLaine meditating on some mountain and suddenly finding herself “observing herself” and then writing a book about it. That journey she took to various sites she visited on her quest for identity began in a place. MacLaine wrote in Out on a Limb that “...Looking back, I can say that making that simple, lazy afternoon decision to visit an unusual bookstore [the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood] was one of the most important decisions of my life.” I’m guessing that the bookstore subsequently became a secular shrine for some of MacLaine’s fans who elevated a particular space to a particular place (imbued with meaning).
It isn’t the time—whatever definition you have of that—but the place that is tangible in the present, or that seems to be tangible in retrospect. And memories of that “ten minutes ago” or “dozens of years ago” can, just as Marcel Proust described in his multi volume Remembrance of Things Past, come from some present day physical experience, such as that smell and taste of a madeleine dipped into tea that led to Proust’s retracing paths like Swann’s Way he knew as a child, a journey not to a disembodied existence, but to a place, specifically Combray (AKA Illiers or Illiers-Combray).
Isn’t that experience common? Anecdote warning; dive, dive, dive…
About a week ago my daughter visited with the specific intention of making me a batch pizzelles, the flat patterned cookies associated with Abruzzo in central Italy and dating back to the 8th century BC. She had kept the waffle-like pizzelle iron that belonged to my mother and the recipe I knew as a child.
As she stacked up the fresh waffle-like pizzelles, the smell of anise began to suffuse my home’s atmosphere as the rising Sun spreads its glow over the dawn sky, rosy fingered as Homer wrote. The anise time machine wafted me to my mother’s fifties-style red formica-countered kitchen. And in the ethereal realm of memory I saw myself, maybe 11 or 12, standing by the gas stove and holding the long handles of the manual waffle iron my mother sometimes delegated me to use before she bought an electric version. A blob of the dough pressed by the manual iron turned into a pizzelle by guesswork and experience: “Donald, put about this much in the iron, hold it over the flame on one side, then flip the iron to do the other side.” It was painstaking work a little boy could accept with the anticipated joy of eating pizzelles and any peripheral cookie matter that oozed out the side of the iron, an excess I broke off and crunched when I stacked the central disks on a plate. Because my mother made pizzelles rather regularly after she entered the age of Edison with an electric pizzelle iron, her house often welcomed any visitor with a slight smell of anise that eventually, I assumed, infused itself in the walls and furniture just as the smell of Schaller’s Fine Bakery used to hang in the dewy morning air above the sidewalk outside the yellow brick building where I peddled my bike slowly just to linger in the hovering smell of fresh bread on my way to see friends. ** Place, not time, reader; place, not time, is primary.
Alpha
Are there exceptions to the primacy of place? Well, beginnings seem especially important to us, and we are fond of acts that symbolize the commencement of something new, like breaking ground for a building, all the dignitaries holding gold-plated shovels on which a little dirt covers the tip just at least for the brief moment required for the local newspaper’s photographer to snap a photo: “Everyone say ‘Dig,’ please.” But the most important beginning for each of us is that alpha moment we cannot associate with any place.
The first “first” in our lives we did not imprint on memory. I cannot expect a description or narrative from you if I say, “Think of that first moment of life, your personal beginning in birth as you arrive like a space alien landing on an unfamiliar planet you have subsequently come to call ‘home.’” Unlike you, however, the space alien could describe an arrival because it (he? she?) came from a place already imprinted and ready for comparison. We arrived with nothing to compare, so that birthplace of yours and mine never embedded itself in long term memory in a brain that had no reference place; and thus, the moment itself is gone because you can’t generate from the reference vacuum. Maybe some ideas and ways of thinking are a priori, but a specific time isn’t. Infancy is a timeless time, isn’t it? In late toddler years, placelessness and timelessness are supplanted by the experiences in places that make time incarnate. After that first lost childhood memory, you might in Proustian detail recall the places where you later celebrated the anniversaries of that long forgotten (or never remembered) birth. “We went to Chuck E. Cheese for my tenth birthday.” “I had a party in my house for my eleventh birthday.” “I met friends at Sam’s Bar for my twenty-first.” “I just sat facing a blank wall at home lamenting my fortieth.”
Don’t many subsequent firsts tie time to place? The place where you met, the place where you got engaged (“Direct your attention to the Jumbotron above the left field stands”), the place where you got hitched (Pachabel’s Canon in D echoing in the background), and all those other “firsts” and the places where they occurred. All those “times” forever (whatever that means for a finite being) affixed by places. Yes, beginnings occur in places, and it’s only the limitation of human development that erases memories of early years until the conscious mind can retrieve them from the hippocampus. I might ask, “What’s your earliest memory? What’s that alpha moment?” I’m betting it’s not time sans place. The only times sans place for you lie forever buried in a young brain with no recollection, in neurons without memory imprints, synapses connecting nothing before that gradual awakening of self awareness, a baby exploring hands and feet, then mother, and crib, and room, and house, and neighborhood, and town…With one exception: that very first memory of yours of you doing something in a place with walls, or trees, or mother…Search your memories now.
Don’t fret over your inability to remember your birth. That’s a cosmic condition. Your birth might not shelter in your accessible memories, but others can remember it for you. There were older humans around to witness it. But the FIRST OF ALL FIRSTS, no one remembers. In no place—and therefore in no time— the universe arose from a singularity surmised to have been smaller than a proton. The event some 13.8 billion years ago can’t be captured even by WMAP, COBE, or JWST. It lies in unremembered past just like your birth. Having been in no place, it now occupies all places, making each of us the center of the universe with the only memory of it lying in the Cosmic Microwave Background at 2.72548±0.00057 K. Hot birth fading into cold radiation.
In Medias Res
In a frequently used plot development, an author begins a story in the middle of things, then retraces the background story forward to fill in the gaps. We know the technique because it’s as old as the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s used in many TV detective stories, the detective seen behind bars in the opening scene, the ensuing scene defined by the caption “Ten days ago…” with the subsequent unfolding of the tale to the opening scene. If you were to start today writing that autobiography to lend permanence to your legacy, you might ask, “How did I get to this point?” as a segue to “It all began when I first met Sally on that bench in Central Park. Little did I then know how that chance meeting would lead to my sitting in this office today.”
Well, right now, with no definitive omega moment in sight, you assume you are in medias res, “in the middle of things” between the known things in your past places and the unknown in some future places. But are you actually in an interminable middle? Your finiteness ensures nothing but its inevitable end. You really don’t know that this moment won’t be your omega moment. Not to frighten you, but your horoscope warns you“to look before you cross a busy street today,” and for you to avoid walking down a dark alley in Bagdad or to avoid using your phone to text while you drive. You might run into a handsome or beautiful stranger today, but you don’t want to actually run into him or her.
Of course, knowing what is a “middle time” in your life is nothing more than awareness of your present. “Middle” presupposes a “before” and an “after.” You might note “before,” and after for schooling, a particular job, or a relationship in retrospect, but not during. You distinguish a “before” and “now,” both characterized by the places that mark them, but not a definitive “middle” until there is an “after,” or omega moment. Trust me on this; I cannot in my early eighties think there won’t be mid-eighties, late eighties, nineties, or a brief moment when I hold the current position of being “the world’s oldest person,” a title that I think I would prefer to replace with “the world’s second oldest person.” Everyone who reaches that oldest age pinnacle is destined to relinquish that position, usually shortly after reaching it.
Middle? I don’t think anyone in the Middle Ages thought he was in “the middle.” Sure, one could be aware of a past, but that only put one in the present. It’s only in retrospect that any of us can note some time we spent in some place that had a before and an after.
Omega Times in Omega Places: The Second Law of Thermodynamics in Action
Then there’s that omega moment that the world’s oldest person will reach. The grand finale in a place TBD. It might be a cushy venue by which others, and not you, associate time and place. You don’t need me to tell you that such a moment will come; deep down you know it even if you cannot visualize yourself experiencing it. You cannot say like Christ, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Nor can you say “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” Nor even like Yahweh, “I Am Who Am,” a statement of timelessness and placelessness. A statement of pure existence itself. Being Itself. Being that by fiat wills beings into being.
Your omega moment is inevitable. It will occur in a place, and it will, as much as we surmise, precede an eternity in “no place,” at least in no place like all the places you have used to mark your finite existence. Given the mystery centered on that last moment before you enter a placeless eternity, I cannot argue that you will not carry the memory of that place into forever or find yourself like Shirley MacLaine reliving all those “middle” moments that once lay between the alpha and omega moments of your life, memories that only arise deja vu in the mind of a “reincarnated you” embodied in a slug or another Shirley MacLaine.
Time’s a tough nut to crack. Brilliant St. Augustine of Hippo said he knew what time was until someone asked him what it was. Is time merely our accounting of the amount of entropy in our lives, the organized stuff diffusing into disorder? Is it an accounting of those moments when we discovered a new order in thoughts or circumstances, such moments punctuating the inevitable dominance of disorder? If the entire universe is headed inexorably toward higher entropy, locally, it isn’t, right? Let me explain.
I’m in the process of replacing the degraded shingles on my roof with a metal roof that’s predicted to last 50 years. As the new roof decays into disorder through wind and ice damage and oxidation, I’ll witness some of the entropy, but I have no illusions about being around at age 130 to replace it and establish a new ordering. Things fall apart, and we put them back together for another go round. Or, we replace them in whole or part. Their decay and the moment of our restoration we mark by duration and instant. Not far from my house is Century Inn, a hotel and tavern on the country’s first National Road that opened in 1794. But a few years ago it caught fire, so the more than 200 year-old hotel that had hosted James K. Polk, General Santa Anna, Marquis de Lafayette, Albert Gallatin, David Bradford, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson had to close for extensive repairs to restore its former glory. Is it time that destroys, or entropy, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics mandates? Before the fire and restoration one could walk on creaking wooden floors, the process of decay taking two centuries, the fire taking an hour or two, the restoration two to three years. The inn is now ready to weather two more centuries.
Back to the Middle
Are you and I in “the middle” as the Mesozoic was sandwiched between the Paleozoic and the Cenozoic or in tighter frame, the Jurassic sandwiched between Triassic and Cretaceous? Yes and no. Maybe you and I are in the middle of things if the planet is 4.5 billion years old and it lasts to its predicted end 4.5 billion years hence. We ride the seesaw by sitting directly over the fulcrum. On one side of us from closer to farther along the board sit Egyptians making pyramids, unknown people making Gobekli Tepe, the Neanderthals going extinct 40,000 years ago and sequentially farther along the board to T-Rex, to trilobites long before dinosaurs, to the first microbes long before trilobites, to microbes long before before multicellular life and the places where they dwelt in Hadean time. That one side of the seesaw is heavy with past life! On the other side sit potentials—life yet to be. So, are we in the middle? The answer is “probably,”maybe,” or “no” because we don’t know what comes after this. If nothing comes after this, then this, dear reader, this is the end and the middle was 2.25 billion years ago during the middle of the Great Oxidation Event.
No really, is this the middle? What if we considered a larger framework, the history and unfolding of the Cosmos? Well, we can make an educated guess. The Cosmos as a whole might be headed for cold diffusion, high entropy, but locally, it will undergo reordering as Andromeda and the Milky Way merge, forming a new ordered entity, a larger galaxy. The time frame for that reordering is billions of years, but that duration is a pinprick on the universe’s drive to diffusion, a process that might take more than one hundred trillion years—give or take a week. Too long to comprehend, anyway.
On the grander scale of the Cosmos, saying that we are in the “Middle of Things” makes little sense in view of the universe’s estimated 100 trillion+ years till it ends. The approximate 14 billion-year age of the universe is a mere 0.00014% of the predicted lifespan of the universe. The biggest omega moment is beyond our comprehension. And to think! It will be on a cosmic scale either a gradual or accelerating end of all places and time.
That Omega Sentence
As usual, your insights will serve you better than mine. I hope I provided you with an adequate point of departure.
*Silvia Bünning and Olaf Blanke: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612305500244
**Schaller’s Fine Bakery is closed now robbing future young bike riders of the experience of smelling freshly baked bread on the sidewalk and street outside. But then, in an age of indoor children holed up with electronics, how many would be out riding bikes?
You’re thinking, “Don’t you mean Minkowski space or Einstein’s Spacetime? And what about matter and energy? You know that E= mc^2 formula everyone knows? You think you know more than the physicists? Humbly, I’ll say, “No, I don’t know more, but for everyone matter and energy always exist in some ‘place’ at some definite time.”
What Is Place?
By “place” I mean any part of the Cosmos that has affected humans directly or indirectly or that has been affected by humans or human consciousness. “Place” is space that has a history of meaning: Your neighborhood, the Gettysburg battlefield on which the fate of a nation was determined or the waters off Midway where the 1942 battle doomed the Japanese to defeat within a matter of minutes, the Acropolis that symbolizes an epitome of human intellectual achievement, or the location you associate with some success or failure. Place is personal—on both an individual and a collective basis. Although I have never visited it, I have a relationship with the Sea of Tranquility born from my watching Armstrong and Aldrin bounce over its surface. I might say the same for sites the Mars rovers tracked and photographed and for the black hole Sagittarius A that astronomers imaged with the Event Horizon Telescope and the technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Through the eyes of others and through technology many locations throughout the Cosmos have become “places” for me.
It’s place that generates deja vu, place that encapsulates a time in your past. Every place has character that is a combination of a physical environment and an experience within that environment. Let me emphasize: Place is more than its physical attributes. In fact, we recognize some places for the experiences of many who preceded us. It isn’t just the physicality of the site, it’s what happened or happens there both in reality and in imagination, or what we anticipate to happen like a good time at the beach, a win at the slots, or a victory over a rival school on the home team’s field. All places have “character,” but some seem somehow to have a richer character, and among those are the places in our personal histories. Ambience isn’t estranged from time; it is time’s safety deposit box. You can revisit a time only because you have a key to the box in your brain’s vault. The key to place is the key to time.
That place embodies personal time is important to me. As the frontispiece of this website asks, “Can you think of ten minutes ago without thinking of place?”
It is this question that drove me to assume a priority of place over time in the human mind. “When I was in elementary school”; “When I was in high school”; “When I had my first job”: All these and similar statements, such as “When I was ten…” conjure images of you in some place, in some physical circumstance. Even if you have experienced one of those rare “out-of-body” moments, you still localize it.”* Every such psychedelic or hallucinogenic experience occurs “in a place,” often seen from a hovering position: You as a drone looking down on you as a person in a place. Think actress Shirley MacLaine meditating on some mountain and suddenly finding herself “observing herself” and then writing a book about it. That journey she took to various sites she visited on her quest for identity began in a place. MacLaine wrote in Out on a Limb that “...Looking back, I can say that making that simple, lazy afternoon decision to visit an unusual bookstore [the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood] was one of the most important decisions of my life.” I’m guessing that the bookstore subsequently became a secular shrine for some of MacLaine’s fans who elevated a particular space to a particular place (imbued with meaning).
It isn’t the time—whatever definition you have of that—but the place that is tangible in the present, or that seems to be tangible in retrospect. And memories of that “ten minutes ago” or “dozens of years ago” can, just as Marcel Proust described in his multi volume Remembrance of Things Past, come from some present day physical experience, such as that smell and taste of a madeleine dipped into tea that led to Proust’s retracing paths like Swann’s Way he knew as a child, a journey not to a disembodied existence, but to a place, specifically Combray (AKA Illiers or Illiers-Combray).
Isn’t that experience common? Anecdote warning; dive, dive, dive…
About a week ago my daughter visited with the specific intention of making me a batch pizzelles, the flat patterned cookies associated with Abruzzo in central Italy and dating back to the 8th century BC. She had kept the waffle-like pizzelle iron that belonged to my mother and the recipe I knew as a child.
As she stacked up the fresh waffle-like pizzelles, the smell of anise began to suffuse my home’s atmosphere as the rising Sun spreads its glow over the dawn sky, rosy fingered as Homer wrote. The anise time machine wafted me to my mother’s fifties-style red formica-countered kitchen. And in the ethereal realm of memory I saw myself, maybe 11 or 12, standing by the gas stove and holding the long handles of the manual waffle iron my mother sometimes delegated me to use before she bought an electric version. A blob of the dough pressed by the manual iron turned into a pizzelle by guesswork and experience: “Donald, put about this much in the iron, hold it over the flame on one side, then flip the iron to do the other side.” It was painstaking work a little boy could accept with the anticipated joy of eating pizzelles and any peripheral cookie matter that oozed out the side of the iron, an excess I broke off and crunched when I stacked the central disks on a plate. Because my mother made pizzelles rather regularly after she entered the age of Edison with an electric pizzelle iron, her house often welcomed any visitor with a slight smell of anise that eventually, I assumed, infused itself in the walls and furniture just as the smell of Schaller’s Fine Bakery used to hang in the dewy morning air above the sidewalk outside the yellow brick building where I peddled my bike slowly just to linger in the hovering smell of fresh bread on my way to see friends. ** Place, not time, reader; place, not time, is primary.
Alpha
Are there exceptions to the primacy of place? Well, beginnings seem especially important to us, and we are fond of acts that symbolize the commencement of something new, like breaking ground for a building, all the dignitaries holding gold-plated shovels on which a little dirt covers the tip just at least for the brief moment required for the local newspaper’s photographer to snap a photo: “Everyone say ‘Dig,’ please.” But the most important beginning for each of us is that alpha moment we cannot associate with any place.
The first “first” in our lives we did not imprint on memory. I cannot expect a description or narrative from you if I say, “Think of that first moment of life, your personal beginning in birth as you arrive like a space alien landing on an unfamiliar planet you have subsequently come to call ‘home.’” Unlike you, however, the space alien could describe an arrival because it (he? she?) came from a place already imprinted and ready for comparison. We arrived with nothing to compare, so that birthplace of yours and mine never embedded itself in long term memory in a brain that had no reference place; and thus, the moment itself is gone because you can’t generate from the reference vacuum. Maybe some ideas and ways of thinking are a priori, but a specific time isn’t. Infancy is a timeless time, isn’t it? In late toddler years, placelessness and timelessness are supplanted by the experiences in places that make time incarnate. After that first lost childhood memory, you might in Proustian detail recall the places where you later celebrated the anniversaries of that long forgotten (or never remembered) birth. “We went to Chuck E. Cheese for my tenth birthday.” “I had a party in my house for my eleventh birthday.” “I met friends at Sam’s Bar for my twenty-first.” “I just sat facing a blank wall at home lamenting my fortieth.”
Don’t many subsequent firsts tie time to place? The place where you met, the place where you got engaged (“Direct your attention to the Jumbotron above the left field stands”), the place where you got hitched (Pachabel’s Canon in D echoing in the background), and all those other “firsts” and the places where they occurred. All those “times” forever (whatever that means for a finite being) affixed by places. Yes, beginnings occur in places, and it’s only the limitation of human development that erases memories of early years until the conscious mind can retrieve them from the hippocampus. I might ask, “What’s your earliest memory? What’s that alpha moment?” I’m betting it’s not time sans place. The only times sans place for you lie forever buried in a young brain with no recollection, in neurons without memory imprints, synapses connecting nothing before that gradual awakening of self awareness, a baby exploring hands and feet, then mother, and crib, and room, and house, and neighborhood, and town…With one exception: that very first memory of yours of you doing something in a place with walls, or trees, or mother…Search your memories now.
Don’t fret over your inability to remember your birth. That’s a cosmic condition. Your birth might not shelter in your accessible memories, but others can remember it for you. There were older humans around to witness it. But the FIRST OF ALL FIRSTS, no one remembers. In no place—and therefore in no time— the universe arose from a singularity surmised to have been smaller than a proton. The event some 13.8 billion years ago can’t be captured even by WMAP, COBE, or JWST. It lies in unremembered past just like your birth. Having been in no place, it now occupies all places, making each of us the center of the universe with the only memory of it lying in the Cosmic Microwave Background at 2.72548±0.00057 K. Hot birth fading into cold radiation.
In Medias Res
In a frequently used plot development, an author begins a story in the middle of things, then retraces the background story forward to fill in the gaps. We know the technique because it’s as old as the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s used in many TV detective stories, the detective seen behind bars in the opening scene, the ensuing scene defined by the caption “Ten days ago…” with the subsequent unfolding of the tale to the opening scene. If you were to start today writing that autobiography to lend permanence to your legacy, you might ask, “How did I get to this point?” as a segue to “It all began when I first met Sally on that bench in Central Park. Little did I then know how that chance meeting would lead to my sitting in this office today.”
Well, right now, with no definitive omega moment in sight, you assume you are in medias res, “in the middle of things” between the known things in your past places and the unknown in some future places. But are you actually in an interminable middle? Your finiteness ensures nothing but its inevitable end. You really don’t know that this moment won’t be your omega moment. Not to frighten you, but your horoscope warns you“to look before you cross a busy street today,” and for you to avoid walking down a dark alley in Bagdad or to avoid using your phone to text while you drive. You might run into a handsome or beautiful stranger today, but you don’t want to actually run into him or her.
Of course, knowing what is a “middle time” in your life is nothing more than awareness of your present. “Middle” presupposes a “before” and an “after.” You might note “before,” and after for schooling, a particular job, or a relationship in retrospect, but not during. You distinguish a “before” and “now,” both characterized by the places that mark them, but not a definitive “middle” until there is an “after,” or omega moment. Trust me on this; I cannot in my early eighties think there won’t be mid-eighties, late eighties, nineties, or a brief moment when I hold the current position of being “the world’s oldest person,” a title that I think I would prefer to replace with “the world’s second oldest person.” Everyone who reaches that oldest age pinnacle is destined to relinquish that position, usually shortly after reaching it.
Middle? I don’t think anyone in the Middle Ages thought he was in “the middle.” Sure, one could be aware of a past, but that only put one in the present. It’s only in retrospect that any of us can note some time we spent in some place that had a before and an after.
Omega Times in Omega Places: The Second Law of Thermodynamics in Action
Then there’s that omega moment that the world’s oldest person will reach. The grand finale in a place TBD. It might be a cushy venue by which others, and not you, associate time and place. You don’t need me to tell you that such a moment will come; deep down you know it even if you cannot visualize yourself experiencing it. You cannot say like Christ, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Nor can you say “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” Nor even like Yahweh, “I Am Who Am,” a statement of timelessness and placelessness. A statement of pure existence itself. Being Itself. Being that by fiat wills beings into being.
Your omega moment is inevitable. It will occur in a place, and it will, as much as we surmise, precede an eternity in “no place,” at least in no place like all the places you have used to mark your finite existence. Given the mystery centered on that last moment before you enter a placeless eternity, I cannot argue that you will not carry the memory of that place into forever or find yourself like Shirley MacLaine reliving all those “middle” moments that once lay between the alpha and omega moments of your life, memories that only arise deja vu in the mind of a “reincarnated you” embodied in a slug or another Shirley MacLaine.
Time’s a tough nut to crack. Brilliant St. Augustine of Hippo said he knew what time was until someone asked him what it was. Is time merely our accounting of the amount of entropy in our lives, the organized stuff diffusing into disorder? Is it an accounting of those moments when we discovered a new order in thoughts or circumstances, such moments punctuating the inevitable dominance of disorder? If the entire universe is headed inexorably toward higher entropy, locally, it isn’t, right? Let me explain.
I’m in the process of replacing the degraded shingles on my roof with a metal roof that’s predicted to last 50 years. As the new roof decays into disorder through wind and ice damage and oxidation, I’ll witness some of the entropy, but I have no illusions about being around at age 130 to replace it and establish a new ordering. Things fall apart, and we put them back together for another go round. Or, we replace them in whole or part. Their decay and the moment of our restoration we mark by duration and instant. Not far from my house is Century Inn, a hotel and tavern on the country’s first National Road that opened in 1794. But a few years ago it caught fire, so the more than 200 year-old hotel that had hosted James K. Polk, General Santa Anna, Marquis de Lafayette, Albert Gallatin, David Bradford, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson had to close for extensive repairs to restore its former glory. Is it time that destroys, or entropy, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics mandates? Before the fire and restoration one could walk on creaking wooden floors, the process of decay taking two centuries, the fire taking an hour or two, the restoration two to three years. The inn is now ready to weather two more centuries.
Back to the Middle
Are you and I in “the middle” as the Mesozoic was sandwiched between the Paleozoic and the Cenozoic or in tighter frame, the Jurassic sandwiched between Triassic and Cretaceous? Yes and no. Maybe you and I are in the middle of things if the planet is 4.5 billion years old and it lasts to its predicted end 4.5 billion years hence. We ride the seesaw by sitting directly over the fulcrum. On one side of us from closer to farther along the board sit Egyptians making pyramids, unknown people making Gobekli Tepe, the Neanderthals going extinct 40,000 years ago and sequentially farther along the board to T-Rex, to trilobites long before dinosaurs, to the first microbes long before trilobites, to microbes long before before multicellular life and the places where they dwelt in Hadean time. That one side of the seesaw is heavy with past life! On the other side sit potentials—life yet to be. So, are we in the middle? The answer is “probably,”maybe,” or “no” because we don’t know what comes after this. If nothing comes after this, then this, dear reader, this is the end and the middle was 2.25 billion years ago during the middle of the Great Oxidation Event.
No really, is this the middle? What if we considered a larger framework, the history and unfolding of the Cosmos? Well, we can make an educated guess. The Cosmos as a whole might be headed for cold diffusion, high entropy, but locally, it will undergo reordering as Andromeda and the Milky Way merge, forming a new ordered entity, a larger galaxy. The time frame for that reordering is billions of years, but that duration is a pinprick on the universe’s drive to diffusion, a process that might take more than one hundred trillion years—give or take a week. Too long to comprehend, anyway.
On the grander scale of the Cosmos, saying that we are in the “Middle of Things” makes little sense in view of the universe’s estimated 100 trillion+ years till it ends. The approximate 14 billion-year age of the universe is a mere 0.00014% of the predicted lifespan of the universe. The biggest omega moment is beyond our comprehension. And to think! It will be on a cosmic scale either a gradual or accelerating end of all places and time.
That Omega Sentence
As usual, your insights will serve you better than mine. I hope I provided you with an adequate point of departure.
*Silvia Bünning and Olaf Blanke: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612305500244
**Schaller’s Fine Bakery is closed now robbing future young bike riders of the experience of smelling freshly baked bread on the sidewalk and street outside. But then, in an age of indoor children holed up with electronics, how many would be out riding bikes?
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