A time to ponder time
NEW YEAR'S DAY is an early epiphany. The turning of numbers on the calendar offers a sudden manifestation of an essential truth of the human condition. Your New Year's resolutions are the secular sacrament of this reckoning. You are acknowledging your life's need of improvement. But what are weight loss or reading habits or even proposed acts of generosity compared with a heightened state of mind? What you need most, perhaps, is just what this day offers -- an intense awareness, as one year folds into another, of what it is to live in time.
There are two kinds of time: chronological time and personal time (philosopher Paul Ricoeur's "clock time" and "internal time"). If this column does its job, you will briefly leave the former for the latter.
The ticking of the clock is the normal measure of experience, but look what that amounts to -- a fragmenting of the life span into discreet bits, from the second to the minute to the hour to the day to the week to the month to the year. Then what?
Usually you move through this sequencing the way, in a familiar metaphor, a fish moves through water, unaware of the realm in which you have your being. The clicks of time's passage go unnoticed, and you are properly absorbed in a permanent present, with the past continually reduced to what lies in your wake, and the future to what you see ahead.
In actuality, the future exists only when, contemplating the past, you remember what you expected of time to come. Day by day, you float in the moment at hand.
But New Year's is different. When a mere number -- 2007 -- draws such attention to itself, the deepest level of awareness is demanding attention, too. Here is the difference between you and the fish: you can notice the water. Your water is time, but noticing the water is how you swim. The future and the past exist only in your mind, but that does not mean they are not real. You are a body moving through the world, but your real movement is through the temporal stream of consciousness.
The first tragedy of mortality is that nothing lasts, but the first glory of human consciousness is the capacity to regain, by simple thought, what is lost in time. The merely chronological becomes personal.
Memory is half of how you do this, transforming bygone disjointedness into a coherent form: a story. Memory is the storytelling faculty in which the tick-tock of fragmentary episodes -- seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years -- are arranged into a flowing narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The first activity of 2007 is bidding farewell to 2006, which you do by telling its story. (Iraq, an epiphany of moral confusion. Warm temperatures, an epiphany of excess consumption. The ubiquitous cellphone, an epiphany of technological imprisonment.) Experience remains incomplete until it is remembered, shaped, and related.
The other half of how you regain what is lost in time is by anticipating the future. Worry is the most obvious mode of doing this.
It is the business of the future to be worrisome. (America attacking Iran? Polar bears extinct? Computer chips implanted in earlobes?) By calling to mind the hard thing that is coming, you experience it in advance, so that when it comes, you are ready. Your future has prepared you for your present. Therefore, your future, because you continually imagine it, is always part of your past. Worry is the revelation of what you want.
What memory is to your past, therefore, desire is to your future. That is why, on this day, you impose order on your wishes by recasting them as resolutions. (Lose 5 pounds. Read Proust on temps perdu. Be nice.) This creates not the future, though, but the present. New Year's resolutions are your way of saying not who you will be, but who you already are. The second tragedy of mortality is that such longings always fall short of fulfillment, but the second glory of human consciousness is the capacity, by picturing what does not yet exist, to create it.
The epiphany of New Year's Day: that the very structure of chronology defines your bottomless capacity for hope. The past, present, and future add up to more. On other days, you assume permanence, but today the transitory character of existence shows itself. That fluidity is the revelation that while time is ever flowing by, what you swim in is eternity.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
