The prelude
Aristotle in
the Physics maintains that Time
cannot be ‘without change (aneu metabolês), for when
the state of our own minds does not change at all (hotan gar mêden autoi metaballȏmen tên dianoian), or we have not noticed it changing
(ê lathȏmen metaballontes,), we do not realize that time has
elapsed (ou dokei hêmin gegonenai chronos,), any more than those who are fabled to sleep among the heroes in
Sardinia do (kathaper oude tois en Sardoi
muthologoumenois katheudein para tois hêrȏsin,) when
they are awakened (hotan egerthȏsiˑ); for they connect the earlier ‘now’ with the later (sunaptousi gar tȏi proteron nun to husteron nun) and make them one (kai
hen poiousin,), cutting out the interval because of their failure to notice
it (exairountes dia tên anaisthêsian to metaxu.).’ (218b21-27, tr. Hardie and Gaye)
Aristotle
does not tell us whether the fabled heroes in Sardinia were dreaming in their
sleep or slept without dreaming, but he seems to be referring to the latter possibility
with the words ‘when the state of our own minds does not change at all’, to the
former with the words ‘when we have not noticed it changing’. What he does not
seem to have contemplated is the difference between the time that may run its
course in our dreams, and the time of our waking; it was this putative
difference he neglected of which his story made me think. I say putative, for I
was pretty sure that in our dreams we may live for hours, while in real time
the dreams may last only minutes. But how could I be sure? I always dreamt a
lot, many of my dreams were very vivid, but I never wrote down any of my
dreams, and I find it very difficult to recollect past dreams.
***
In September
4 to 6 I intend to have ‘Three days in Prague devoted to philosophy’. The first
day will be devoted to self-knowledge, the second to Kant, the third to Plato
and Aristotle. I intend to speak without paper. Behind each of these themes are
years of hard work. To concentrate all that work into three forty five minutes
talks, this is the challenge I am facing – if anybody comes. So far I have
invited academics from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard,
Heidelberg, and Berlin. So far I have not received a single positive response,
and I am prepared to spend those three days alone in Stromovka, the former deer
park of Prague kings, walking through the park, thinking of those three themes,
and enjoying every minute of it. But what if some people come? Apart from my
work on neurophysiology (contemplating its relevance for self-knowledge), on
Kant, on Plato and Aristotle, I must work on my English. And so in every spare
minute I listen to Stephen Fry’s reading of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.
On Friday, a
day before yesterday, I listened to the last few chapters, in which J. K. Rowling
audaciously displays the difference between the Time that takes its course when
one is unconscious and the real time, when one is conscious. Let me give the
gist of her narrative. Harry Potter had learnt that he was a Horcrux; a part of
Voldemort’s (the Dark Lord’s) soul was blasted apart from the whole, and
latched itself to the only living soul, the soul of the little Harry, whom
Voldemort came to kill. If Voldemort was to be destroyed, Harry must die by
Voldemort’s hand. And so Harry went along his lonely road to death, to meet
Voldemort. Voldemort raised his wand, directing the Killing Curse at Harry: ‘a
flash of green light, and everything was gone … He [Harry] lay face down, listening
to the silence … A long time later, or maybe no time at all, it came to him
that he must exist.’
For some
time Harry was alone, naked, then he heard that something was there that made
noises; he wanted to get dressed, the robes appeared a short distance away, he
got dressed, then he saw the thing that made the noises: ‘It had a form of a
small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough,
flayed-looking … “You cannot help.” He spun round. Albus Dumbledore [the famous
Headmaster of Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry, now dead] was
walking towards him.’
They had so
many things to discuss. Dumbledore had
to explain to Harry all those things he had never told him when he was alive,
and which were essential for Harry to know, to help him to finally destroy
Voldemort. Among many other things Harry learnt that the disgusting ‘thing’ that made the abject noises was the
Horcrux, the part of Voldemort’s soul hit by Voldemort’s Killing Curse. Their
talk was marked by pauses – ‘There was a pause … Harry waited, but Dumbledore
did not speak, so he prompted him … They sat in silence for a long time, and
the whimperings of the creature behind them barely disturbed Harry any more …
After another short pause, Harry said … “Tell me one last thing,” said Harry.
“Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” – “Of course it is
happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is
not real?” … He was lying face down on the ground again … Every inch of him
ached … The Death Eaters had been huddled round Voldemort, who seemed to have
fallen to the ground. Something had happened when he had hit Harry with the
Killing Curse. Had Voldemort, too, collapsed? It seemed like it. And both of
them had fallen briefly unconscious and both of them had now returned.’
***
On Friday, a
day before yesterday, I took Nera, my daughter, to Attwoolls, a Camping shop,
which is half-way from our place to Gloucester. She needed a torch with red
light for her Scouts and Explorers Jamborette. On the way to the shop she
complained about our Volkswagen Passat: ‘It is too big; I hate it. When mummy
comes back [Doina is sailing at the moment with our son Dan in the Pacific],
she must sell this car and buy a small one.’
Nera left
for the Jamborette in Haarlem in Holland that evening; I shall be on my own for
ten days with our dog Tessie and Nera’s three little rats.
***
On Saturday
I went for my usual long walk with Tessie. I kept thinking about Aristotle’s
fabled heroes sleeping in Sardinia and about J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter at
King’s Cross. The theme on which I am going to write next is ‘Aristotle’s concept
of time’. If I am to mention Aristotle’s sleeping heroes, I cannot avoid
mentioning J. K. Rowling’s relativity of Time, for it is highly relevant to the
subjective aspects of time, to which Aristotle pays attention in his account of
time. But how can I be sure that her narrative is anything more than an
imaginative play? It sounds right to me, for when I try to recollect my past
dreams … – but my recollections are too hazy. It will be better to skip both Aristotle’s
Sardinian heroes and Rowling’s imaginative narrative from ‘Aristotle’s concept
of time’. It will pain me, for Aristotle obviously thought that the mythical
story, with which he opened his own positive account of time, pointed to
something important about our perception of time.
***
I began to
work on ‘Aristotle’s concept of time’ three weeks ago. I left it half-way
through, ‘distracted’ by the website of the Department of Physiology at
Cambridge University, which compelled me to write the ‘Notes on the relevance
of neurophysiology to human self-knowledge’. Yesterday, when I at last decided
to return to Aristotle, I began by reading Aristotle’s account of Time in the Physics all anew. I read Aristotle’s
texts in short, very intensive bursts of concentrated activity. In the
intervals I have been reading Locke’s Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, aloud, to keep my voice in good form; what
if someone comes to my ‘Three days in Prague’ and I will talk for hours?
***
I spent the Saturday
evening listening to the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Then I had
a bath, went to sleep at 1 a. m. and woke up at 5.45 a. m.; I had to go to the
toilet. Rightly or wrongly, I blame for my week bladder my stay in prison. In
1957 I refused to be conscripted and was imprisoned. It was in Slovakia,
shortly after the Hungarian uprising (1956); the prisons were full; in the cell
design for two there were five of us. I was the youngest, my mattress the
thinnest. It was a new wing, with a toilet on which you hock in the corner, a
hose above it. The water switch didn’t work; the prison guards didn’t want to
be bothered to switch it on whenever anyone of us wanted to drink, and so they
let the water run through the day, from morning till bed time. The water
splashed all around and soaked the adjacent cement floor. Being the youngest, I
had to squeeze my matrass over the toilet and the wet floor. I was in that cell
for some three weeks. When I got out of prison, I worked for a year and a half
as a forest worker, and then I was summoned again to the military. This time I
did not refuse to be conscripted. During the 15 months of my imprisonment I
studied Marx’ Capital and realised
that with Marx I could do more for the humane transformation of my country than
with the strict adherence to non-violence in compliance with Tolstoy, passing
from one imprisonment to another. Within the first three weeks in the military
I got ill; I got kidney inflammation, went to the hospital, and then for the
next five years I was checked every year for proteins in my blood; since
proteins were always found in my blood, after those five years I was
permanently discharged from the military duty. – I often think of all this when
my bladder interrupts my sleep and forces me to go to the toilet. I did so this
time, my thoughts about the prison and the military blended with Agatha
Christie’s Murder, which entered into
my dreams, which I vaguely recollected, as in a haze.
Last night was very cold. When I got back to bed, I could not get warm. I did not want to get up again, but in the end I had to get another blanket. Then I tossed and turned, I could not get back to sleep … And then I woke up.
***
The dream
I
must have woken up not long after I fell asleep, for my bladder did not bother me. I had one of those rare dreams, which are very vivid; I lay in bed and
re-lived it over and over again:
I was in a
bank that looked very much like the Lloyd’s Bank in the little town in which
we live. I handed over to the cashier my savings book (spořitelní knížka). The cashier told me that I had
won three and a half million pounds. I was slightly taken aback, for I have
never plaid at any lottery, but I did not protest. The cashier wrote the amount
in my savings book, and finalized the act with a rubber stamp. What should I do
with the money? My wife wanted to buy a car, and so I went to look for a
suitable car dealer; I thought there was a new type of car with a fuel that
made virtually no pollution. I found the dealer, but he told me he stopped
selling that car; it was too expensive, very few people wanted to buy it. But
he told me of another dealer who was definitely still selling it. On my way to
the dealer I met my wife.
I was
painfully aware that we had decided to separate, after I return from Prague. It
happened a few weeks ago. I intended to go to Oxford, to make my abode in front
of Balliol College, and thus to protest both against the refusal of the Pension
Service to investigate the basis on which it was decided that I owed the
Pension Service more than £11,000, the decision in the making of which I
suspect a hand of someone from Oxford University [see on my blog ‘It is all
wrong’, June 15, and ‘It has nothing to do with Oxford University’, June 19],
and against my exclusion from academic community [see texts on my website under
the heading ‘Protests at Balliol’]. But now the three and a half millions I
have received changed all this. Would my wife find it possible to live with me
again?
Our marriage
deteriorated sharply after my wife began to earn more money and I lost the
Pension Credit. My weekly Basic State Pension of £39.95 minus Adjustment of
£13.00 meant that my weekly income was £26.95. In consequence, I turned to
myself and began to live only for my work; it became impossible to live with
me. How shall I tell Doina, delicately, that my financial situation has
changed, and that it might be possible that I might change too, that we could
live together again?
The dealer
showed us the car my wife would have liked.
The maximum speed was 100 miles per hour, but we were not interested in
buying a fast car. We test-drove it; Doina liked it, but she thought it too
expensive. And so I told her of the money. We bought the car. I began to think
what we should do next: ‘Let us go to a country where summers are real summers.
Now you will have the possibility to devote yourself to writing. That’ what you
always wanted to do, but you never could, being the sole bread winner in the
family.’
But then I corrected
myself: ‘No, my place is in Oxford. We can buy a house there. Will you live
with me in Oxford?’ – ‘I will, but don’t expect me to devote myself to teaching
you how to pronounce English properly.’ – ‘Don’t worry. You helped me when I
was recording the lecture on “Socrates, Plato, and the Laws of Athens” [for my
website]. Do you remember? I was listening to the recordings of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, stopping the
reader after every phrase and sentence, trying to imitate his intonation. You
listened, and said: “You are doing it all wrong. Your voice goes up at the end
of every phrase and every sentence. In English the voice goes down.” How could
it have happened that for more than thirty years I was thinking and speaking
English without noticing this capital flaw in my pronunciation? If my lecture
became free of it, it’s thanks to you. But since then I must have relapsed into
my old bad habits, conditioned by my native Czech. During the past few weeks I
read aloud the whole of Berkeley’s Principles,
all wrong. I noticed it only a few days
ago, when I began to read aloud Locke’s Essay.
Now I have been imitating Fry’s Harry Potter to get the intonation right.
May I hope
that we shall live together in Oxford? Hopefully, I will be allowed to teach there
at last. I have on my website 12 chapters of the 1st volume of Lost
Plato, and I have written two or three chapters designed for the 2nd
volume. All this could form the basis of my lecture course on Plato. In the
course of giving my lectures I would revise what I have written, and hopefully
finish the book. What do you think, will it work? Our children will benefit, if
we do not split up.’– Before Doina could answer me, I woke up.
I went to
the toilet again. My alarm clock on the window sill was indicating 7.20 in the
morning. My dream has corroborated J. K. Rowling’s King’s Cross narrative. The
time of my dream was much longer than the real time, during which my dreaming lasted,
could possibly have been.
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