What's the time, Mr Einstein?

It’s a straightforward enough question.

At least, I thought it was until I read Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman recently.  It turns out that learning to tell the time is not quite as simple as my primary school teachers previously led me to believe. 

Lightman’s book takes us to Berne, Switzerland.  The year is 1905 and a young patent clerk, named Albert Einstein, has been experiencing a series of remarkable dreams about the nature of time.  Each dream takes him to a different kind of world, where time defines reality in a different way.

 In one of these worlds, Lightman explains, ‘it is instantly obvious that something is odd.  No houses can be seen in the valleys or plains.  Everyone lives in the mountains.’

The reason for this, it transpires, is because someone once worked out that time travels more slowly the farther we are from the centre of the earth.  Despite the fact that the effect is miniscule, once this phenomenon was known, people moved to the mountains in an effort to stay young. 

‘To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts.  The mountaintops all over the world are nested with such houses, which from a distance look like a flock of fat birds squatting on long skinny legs.  People most eager to live longest have built their houses on the highest stilts.  Indeed, some houses rise half a mile high on their spindly wooden legs.  Height has become status.’

Despite the extraordinary lengths to which these people were prepared to go, however, their refusal to descend into the lowlands to farm and produce fresh food eventually sealed their fate.  At length, Lightman explains, these people became ‘thin like the air, bony, old before their time.’

Fast forward to 2010 and to a small corner of Brussels, Belgium.  Another young man is sitting in my favorite chair, in the corner of our living room.  Every evening after school he is there, typing his hopes and dreams onto the screen of his laptop computer – writing his blog. 

I recognize the excitement in his eyes as he stumbles upon another idea.  I watch his fascination grow at his capacity to harness the power of the Internet and connect with friends, family and perfect strangers across the globe.  I smile at his perfectionism – his innate need to get things right first time and go from A to Z without stopping along the way.

I wonder where he gets that from?

As if I need to ask. 

And if I did need to ask, it would appear that Einstein already dreamed about my world too – a world in which ‘time is a circle, bending back upon itself’ and ‘repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.’

‘In the world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.  So too every moment that two friends stop becoming friends, every time that a family is broken because of money, every vicious remark in an argument between spouses, every opportunity denied because of a superior’s jealousy, every promise not kept.  And just as all things will be repeated in the future, all things now happening happened a million times before.’

Sitting in front of me, the young man hasn’t had this particular dream yet.  He continues to be inspired by absolute uniqueness of his life. 

All I can see, on the other hand, is my history repeating itself right in front of my eyes.

I think I’ll go climb that mountain.