The other day, I was noticing how slowly time seems to go these days.

In a bad way, I can look ahead at an afternoon or an evening and think, “I’ll never make it through this.” In a good way, I can think, “I’ve got all the time I need. I can relax.”

The other day, I had a feeling of being into a just endlessly expandable kind of mental time. I’d rather think of this as a good thing. After all, the faster you time goes, the sooner you die. My neighbor Rita, who’s in her 80s, was bemoaning this the other day. “You say Christmas is in two weeks? I feel like last Christmas was just two weeks ago. I feel like I’m on a express train to the graveyard.”

My time slowdown is happening — why? I can think of three possible causes.

(1) Idleness. I’m not teaching, and don’t have the concomitant mental check-list: do this, do that, do the other thing, etc. I’m still adjusting to retirement.

A job makes time pass because you carry with you a mental check-list that makes the time melt away. Plus there’s the commuting to help kill the day. Even now, when I read, or write, or when I work on my blog, the time melts away. A hobby, like a job, is a “pastime”.

TV is a pastime, too, but to me, watching TV almost always feels like I’m being robbed. I think I’d rather spend my time staring at my shoe.

I do have more empty time than before. I have to fight the capitalist, puritanical fear of empty time. Slow, empty time is a good thing.

(2) Thoughts per second. Another factor in the time slowdown could perhaps be that, thanks to thinking about philosophy so much as I work on my Lifebox book, the world is starting to seem denser and stranger to me. Trippier.

I’ve always thought that the speed at which I perceive time to be flowing might relate to the rate at which I’m having thoughts. So if you’re having a billion thoughts per second, then, yeah, a second seems like a long time. And if you settle in on the zombified gerbil wheel of TV programming, with a thought every five minutes or so, then yeah, the whole evening is gone in a flash.

But I'm not really sure I'm thinking that much more than I ever did.

(3) Isolation. Talking to people passes the time. Now that I'm retird, I’m spending more and more of my time alone.

The idea that conversation speeds up the perceived passage of time doesn’t really dovetail with the “thoughts per second” idea that time goes faster when you have fewer thoughts. Because it seems like you’d be having more thoughts rather than fewer thoughts if you’re having a lively conversation, so it would seem that the conversation should seem to make time go slower rather than faster.

I think the reason conversation speeds time up is that it takes me out of myself. If I’m continually monitoring my personal state, navel-gazing if you will, then the time will seem to go slower because I’ll have a lot of memories of wondering what time it is. Nothing slows time down like looking at your watch every thirty seconds, like when you’re waiting for a work day to be over. Or in the back seat of your parents car asking, “Are we there yet?”

What time is it now? Is that all?

Elena told us the surf was up. My wife and I drove down to Cruz and went to a beach I call Magic Door beach, it’s about 6.3 miles north of the last traffic light in Cruz on, of course, Rt. 1. Parking area is on the left, high up, flat, long, like a waiter’s tray holding cars, rutted, muddy, you walk across the tracks and down some scree to an ampitheater beach.

Whoomp! I walked up behind the rock where the waves were booming. A peaceful tidepool there.

And in the pool, the aliens dreamed all unaware. Life is calm in La Hampa.

I got real close to the rock to shoot this veil of spray. There’s always a seagull or two just perched somewhere in the scene (not shown here) calmly diggin’ it, happy as a Big Sur cow.

And then we went to the Magic Door at the left end of the beach. And made it through.

There’s a whole ‘nother hidden beach on the other side, this is La Hampa as well. Gray and sandstone rock makes art heroine dreams.

It’s nice to have my dear wife here this time — instead of just my shadow.

I found the shrunken head of that third person you always see in your dreams.

We were reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to each other on Wednesday, wondering if it had something to do with the Grail Legend. And there’s this creepy passage about the third person you see in your dreams. I want to have this personage show up when, say, two of my characters are walking around in La Hampa.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

— But who is that on the other side of you?”

And then a little dog came up and ran away with this particular kelp-bulb head.

Yesterday we had a little dinner party for our neighbors. It's always nice when the house is clean and everything is tidy. Poised for action.

We had our friend Elena and her husband Gunnar. Elena is quite a character.

The occasion was the visit of Elena's son Jerry with his new wife Anne and baby Lula.

I love babies. Anne is French, from Nancy, she says that back home doting fathers are called “Papa Poule,” the male version of “Mother Hen.”

I made a fish stew for the meal. But for me the high point was the chocolate cake.

When I'm full of sweets, things begin to look dreamy. Life's lovely computations all around. Oh, forget computation. Life all around.

All I did yesterday was work on The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I drew a picture and wrote something to explain this certain idea I have about how we might get a deterministic universe despite the wifty, come-drink-the-Koolaid mystery-mongering of quantum mechanics. But what the bleep do I know?

***

I’d like to suggest that maybe there really is only our one sheet of spacetime, that this sheet obeys a deterministic reversible Physics Rule akin to a reversible CA. Let’s suppose for now that one can in fact slice our spacetime into spacelike sheets. In this case, we can use the Physics Rule to derive all of our spacetime, past and future, from any one spacelike sheet. So in order to “explain” our universe, we only need to explain one single spacelike sheet. The picture below shows where I’m heading with this.

Figure 2.23: A Physics and a Metaphysics to Explain All of Spacetime.

In this picture we think of there being two distinct CA rules, a Physics Rule and a Metaphysics Rule. The vertical plane represents our spacetime, and the line across its middle represents a spacelike “sheet.” The Physics Rule is a reversible CA that grows the spacelike sheet upwards and downwards to fill out the entire past and future of spacetime. And the Metaphysics Rule accounts for the contents of that spacelike sheet. The Metaphysics Rule is not reversible; it grows sideways across paratime, turning some simple seed into the pattern found in the singled-out spacelike sheet.

In order to explain one particular spacelike slice of spacetime, we invoke a Metaphysics Rule which is like a CA that grows the space pattern from some presumably simple seed. When I speak of this metaphysical growth as occurring in paratime, I need only mean that it’s logically prior to the existence of our spacetime. We don’t actually have to think of the growth as being something that’s experientially happening.

***

Got it? Good. Quiz on Monday.