![]() From this vantage point, where are we to look? At this very second, we have a particular vantage point from which to consider eternity. We are a small part of a much grander whole. But how intolerant he is of the old usages and politenesses of society.Read about Head of School Jim Knight’s meditation on eternity and our understanding of time.Įach moment-this moment-is part of eternity. She goes on to write: "I think that Mr Eliot has written some of the loveliest single lines in modern poetry. In fact Woolf's essay is about the difficulty she and her contemporaries have in rendering the human character through fiction. This ringing phrase is usually quoted in contexts that suggest Woolf was registering the impact of modernity - and in particular new scientific theories and their technological applications. Virginia Woolf stated, in her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown that "on or about December 1910 human character changed". The terrifying destructive power of this weaponry is a correlation, surely, of the fearsome implications of E = MC², because once we see that all time is unredeemable, such is our rage and disorientation that - like stroppy teenagers - we trash our own space. The implications of Newtonian physics took centuries to be fully expressed through technology, but it was a scant 40 years between Einstein's first revolutionary paper and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. After all, while physical interactions may have the apparent simplicity of impacting billiard balls, it's reassuring to know there's someone who built the table. I would argue that it's really this aspect of Newton's thinking - the murky interface between his scientific theories and his religious belief - that enables our own clarity. The Newtonian universe is exactly calibrated, like a chronometer, and leaves plenty of conceptual room for a divine creator to exist outside its casing. Somehow this doesn't prevent me grasping Newton's view of both space and time as absolutes within which the phenomena we perceive can be categorised. ![]() This may well be so - certainly, I lack the necessary understanding of probability theory required to be conversant with quantum mechanics, but then again, I'm also all at sea with differential calculus, the mathematics that fixes in the real world the parabolas described by Newton's laws of motion. I once heard some philosophers of science comparing the Newtonian and the Einsteinian revolutions in our understanding of the physical world, and one of them said that the key difference between the two was that laypeople could intuitively grasp the former's principles, whereas the mathematics describing the latter are so complex their implications can only be comprehended by the scientific illuminati. However, I don't really want to discuss that but instead focus on time itself, and our conception of it. ![]() The inclination is, I think, to relate Eliot's insight directly to notions of free will, and hence to moral responsibility - the attribution of which is the thing that most preoccupies us in our social existence. True, Eliot sounds a speculative note with that "perhaps" in the second line, yet his meaning still seems clear enough - if our perception of time as moving ever forward like a river is purely subjective, and the whole span of time - together with all actual events - has already transpired, then nothing we will ever do or say can alter the future, let alone the past. "Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable." The opening lines of TS Eliot's Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, were written in the 1930s, but while they may be familiar to many of you, I wonder if any of us have really stopped to consider their full import.
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