Certain friends have challenged me by asking how it is that I dare to keep scribbling these outdoor hiking columns — that I’ve scrawled and rambled over the same terrain in space-time and also figuratively. How many columns can a fellow write about Figueroa Mountain, the Carizzo Plain, the Sisquoc River campsites and Davy Brown Camp, eh?
Yet, we know the hallmark of the past 350 years in the Western history has been a tremendous emphasis on the individual. We observe the distinction in high culture (epic figures such as Napoleon, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein) as well as in middle-brow and low-culture: Recall J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield gleefully farting out loud in church (in 1951’s “The Catcher in the Rye”).
Therefore, yeah, I reply to my friendly critics, as I confidently pen my tales of backcountry walking adventures. The conditions along these various trails into the San Rafael Wilderness constantly vary, which is part of the enticement and enjoyment. So it is with differences between evolving human individuals; hikers know that we never walk on the same trail twice.
How can I write, “We never walk on the same trail twice”?
We can study the changing western concepts of time as well as the ways famously “atomized” western individuals wrestle with temporality (you know: change, death, birth, ritual shifts).
St. Augustine’s famous statement that when he merely lived in time it seemed quite clear to him, but once his mind attempted to grasp time as an object of thought, it slipped away. We who live after the European scientific revolution don’t have St. Augustine’s problem. Newton, for example, felt space and time were not connected. The newer rational space-time concepts have managed to enhance our human thinking apparatus in many useful ways. We can separate out the concept of cosmic linear time, but there certainly have been costs, too.
In terms of space, Newton replaced the older understanding of “place” (topos) as an area filled with something; place is defined by what exists within it. Since Newton, a given volume of space is identified by its abstract coordinates. When I use wild Pete’s GPS device, I “know” where I am and I’ve objectified the area; I could call in a rescue using these coordinates.
Thus, modern physics identified time with how we can “measure” it objectively; for example, I always use the terms BCE and CE to write about history, or to date ancient Mediterranean stone anchors (to about 1200 BCE). Another way to think about the changes wrought by the European scientific revolution is to ask about “the problem of linear time.” Various westerners, including some of my hiking pals, are quite sure that objectified linear time is the only kind of “time”; it’s the only time that is “real” for them.
However, even into William Shakespeare’s late 1600s CE “time” was mostly identified by the conditions it manifests — e.g., when Hamlet cries out that, “The time is out of joint/O cursed spite/that ever I was born,” bemoaning his violent time period.
Modern philosopher Charles Taylor, whom I’ve quoted at length before in these columns, speaks to our postmodern problem of linear time and the dual definitions of temporality.
Taylor wants us to remember that “time” can also be defined as (individual) lived-time. St. Augustine dwelled solely in lived-time back in the 4th century C.E. I believe all the pleasure and sustenance one obtains while out hiking in nature derives from the overwhelming feelings of lived-time. This becomes precious non-objectified time spent On The Trail.
Like most of us, I have no problems with the scientists’ concept of cosmic time, where we see infinitely divisible units of time (and space) out there, awaiting our hypotheses and research and inventions (fusion power, anyone?). Yet, modern science has imposed this essentially linear definition of time upon us, presenting it as “cosmic time” (includes the infinity concept).
However, in relation to the cosmic space of modern physics, with its abstracted coordinates, our understanding of lived-time feels completely alien and different from objectified cosmic time. By the 1800s and 1900s in Europe, there was a very strong reaction to the hard boundaries of the scientific space-time continuum — it hit first in Germany with the early Romantic poets around Friedrich Schiller and moved to France with Charles Baudelaire in the later 1800s, and let us not forget William Blake’s ecstatic visions and poetry in England in the 1790s.
Taylor has shown that once the scientific revolution pressed on after the 17th and 18th centuries, “time as a field of experience to be appreciated [lived-time] fades in favor of time as a resource to be managed.” Taylor isn’t so shallow as to bother criticizing this change to hyper-emphasis on objectified time (cosmic time), but he has written powerfully about the heavy impact this definition of time has had.
Henri Bergson did not believe that “time” meant living in discrete often linear units, but that it could only be captured as “flow,” as movement. Other philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger took up the issue, which simply put is “how to rescue lived-time from its scientific distortion.”
We typically objectify and measure time (and space) in cosmic terms, as specific units and measured volumes. Grasping time as a series of separable moments is possible and wildly productive in scientific research environments, of course. But Taylor and each of us who loves art or sports or hiking or music — or intense individual experience knows that time as specific units (moments) is NOT how time comes through to us immediately. It isn’t how we feel it as children. Bergson and Baudelaire lived in 19th century France, but both understood that the crucial lived-time needs to be shaped by stories, by narrative, by aesthetic appreciation. In narrative, of course, not all moments are of equal significance.
My recent narrative descriptions of glorious Fir Canyon show how much that space (topos) has changed even in a few years (erosion and intense rainfall) but also reveal how much I have altered as an individual (here and here).
When the poet Baudelaire moans about the prevalence of melancholy [or Le spleen] in his society, he is working through the nasty mixing of these two conceptions of time: 1) as metered (quantified), and 2) as experienced by the individual in the pungent lived-time.
Taylor writes this about Baudelaire, how in the melancholy poet’s work spleen can mean: “We are imprisoned in the momentary but borderless time which is incessantly repeated.” (In French, Le spleen means melancholy, and a suffocating sense of world-weariness akin to boredom.) The good German term for this is Weltschmerz — World-Pain. Like, it’s just too much.
As a society and a western culture we have gained hugely by objectifying time and space — we all understand this. Let’s say you are very successful in what you do in life, you are a vigorous entrepreneur, you manage your time effectively and coordinate your personal calendar with your partner’s, for example. But there can still be something missing in your lived-time day-to-day life. Through Baudelaire’s poems in Les Fleurs du Mal Taylor can explain how so many individuals have lost their ability to locate those portals to higher times. (We used to call these ecstatic experiences/visions as part of religion, and always found them somewhere off the grid, usually in nature.)
Many of us individuals seek out experiences which help us recover contact with a deep meaning in things (events, relationships, rituals, music). As individuals we desperately need these electrifying times “on the trail” where lived-time overwhelms metered time. On hikes with students, I always had them place their watches in their pockets (or I collected them); or more recently made sure to turn off their iPhones and stow them deep in their daypacks, and not look up “the time” until the trip has been concluded.
Lived-time is simply right now; savoring the immediate present, maybe on some ecstatic green path and accepting “the now” of recovered juvenescence. Newton’s Clock-Maker’s Universe and quantified clock-time are not real in these unmeasured domains striding through nature. Without retaining this capacity to relocate areas of lived-time we may be leaving young adults and our children effectively unmoored and often confused. (See Haidt in 4.1.1.)
4.1.1.
Much of this about time comes from Charles Taylor’s recent “Cosmic Connections” (Harvard University Press 2024) and his earlier “A Secular Age” (2007); my earlier bit on “lived-time”; Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” (2024) supports the idea that the “Great Rewiring” [of our kids’ minds] facilitates the loss their vital sense of lived-time. Haidt’s research and summaries confirm my worries about over-wired children based on 36 years of teaching experience.
