---
type: post
date: 2013-11-10
slug: on-time
title: On Time
---

I wrote a story in high school called "All of Time at Once" which was about the
first large-scale time-travel proof-of-concept project.  It involved sending one
person back in time two years to meet themselves with minimal exposure to the
outside world at large.  Additionally, they were not to let on that they were
the same person as themselves to themselves in the process so as to keep any
sort of psychological break from happening.  It was merely a means to show that
it could work, that a person could be sent back a reasonable period of time,
interfere with someone unimportant enough that it wouldn't do anything weird,
and then, carry on as some sort of amanuensis, living proof that it had worked.

Of course, it didn't work like that.

The story wasn't about the technological feat that was involved in sending
someone back through time, nor about somehow maintaining the integrity of the
timeline, but what it would do for someone to be confronted by someone who was
exactly them, how much damage it would cause internally.

The story wasn't well written - I was 16 or something - and I keep thinking I'll
revise it some day, but I never get around to it, of course.  The idea and the
title have stuck with me throughout, however.

Particularly because what happens to the main character as they spend two years
confronted by exactly themselves in every way except looks (some cosmetic
surgery before the experiment being obligatory) and age is that they spend
basically two years in a dissociative panic attack.  One that is only relieved
when they, in turn, travel back to meet themselves at that crucial moment and
they finally get to see "all of time at once".

> Really?

Shut up, I really liked Heinlein growing up.

I am coming down (I think) from a dissociative panic attack, typing with the aid
of whatever spell check vim has to offer.  I spent most of the last
`$PERIOD_OF_TIME` on a dog walk starting somewhere before the peak of things;
I'd call it maybe halfway up (as compared to my two-thirds of the way down right
now).  I spent most of that walk thinking about time, when I was thinking
coherently.

It seems to me that the problem with losing time during panic is that the
further into panic one gets, the smaller a quanta of time gets.  It's as though
the amount of cohesive time I can possibly hold in my head is limited to
whatever space is left to cognition, and that space diminishes, and then later
expands, during a panic attack.  By the time words and language started coming
back to me around the south-west edge of the lake, I was operating at about one
step's worth of time, and up to about five steps by the time I made the decision
to turn right and extend the walk a little further so that I wouldn't be totally
off by the time I got home.  At my pace, that's a little less than a second, and
about three seconds respectively, which probably could be extrapolated into blah
blah blah.

> Really?

I'm not done yet.  That's not even what I'm about, dude.

Either way, it made me think back to that story because the ultimate relief for
the main character, the ultimate end to all of their panic, was that final
experience before they landed somewhere back in the past, where they were
allowed, for one brief instant, to experience all of time at once.

That translated, on my walk, to the idea that maybe that's the type of thing
that plays a big role in some of the more contemplative religions and mysticisms
out there.  The perception of time in such a way as to provide some sort of
enlightenment.  The idea makes less and less sense to me as time goes on, as
such things are wont to do, but the dire import struck me on my walk, as I
slowly increased the amount of time that I perceive as a cohesive or coherent
"moment".

> Really?

Sometimes frameworks help to provide context for the incomprehensible.

> Sure, but you realize that
> he corollary is that there is some ultimate state of panic, some sort of true
> hell, which involves being simply reduced to some Planck unit of time as one's
> cohesive or coherent "moment".

True hell is a bit dramatic, isn't it?

> But the panic made the whole experience cohesive to you, even if perception of
> time was not.  There was some bit of you that lasted through the experience
> in order to tie it together into a story after the fact.  If there was some
> bit of you experiencing truly dissociated moments of incomprehensible input
> reduced to an impossibly short measure of time enough to tie them together
> into a story...

Pleasant.  Okay, I'll accept hellish.

> Good.
>
> After all, that's all you are, anyway.  Panic is just recognition of that
> fact.
