Time and Waiting
For four days the table is occupied by Katy’s jigsaw puzzle. It mustn’t be moved. It’s a difficult one: a picture of a steam train, with lots of leafy foliage and vague white steam, which means many pieces that look extremely similar. Katy works at it patiently, and spends an entire day finishing it off. She tells me that she learns a lot from the experience: that you only find the right piece when you stop looking for it; that when you think there’s no solution and you walk away, the solution offers itself to you when you return. I do not help with the jigsaw puzzle. I have made a surprising discovery about myself on this trip: I am impatient.
We have a calendar on the wall, on which we cross out each day as it ends – counting off the days until we arrive in Cape Town. Due to bad weather, and waiting at anchor, we have been adding days almost as fast as we cross them off: seven extra days so far. A lot of this voyage has been about passing time, and waiting. Waiting to leave, waiting to arrive. In some ways it is a luxury for us both: to have so much TIME at our disposal. Time to think and read, time to sunbathe and relax. But as we near a month on the boat, we feel like we are running out of ways to fill the time. Each day is similar, the routines of the boat runs like clockwork, and there is a ‘Groundhog Day’ like repetition of waking, meal times, and conversations with the crew. We repeat daily tasks to keep track of the passing time: a logbook, a video diary, daily sea observations, and photos of the sunset.
We have been reading Henri Bergson’s writings on Time and Duration. Bergson challenges our usual conception of time, as a linear experience: he argues that this way of understanding time is based in a scientific, spatial way of thinking. The way we describe our experiences of the world in this mode of thinking are as something we can count, and quantify. He argues that what we actually experience in our lives is very difficult to reduce to language, and that our experience of time is not an unwavering forward march. He offers instead the notion of ‘Pure Duration’: our experiences as we live them, which are not a linear narrative. Time is simultaneous, fluid and flowing: our inner experiences of the world are overlaid with immediate and remembered emotion, sensation and association. The closest we may come to an awareness of Pure Duration is in our dream life, where there is no linearity.
Bergson uses the metaphor of melody as a way of thinking about our experience of duration: ‘The metaphor of the musical phrase conveys the notion of ensemble that attaches to the experience of duration… a multiplicity without homogeneity, in which states of feeling overlap and interpenetrate one another, instead of being organised into a distinct succession.’ [Time & Free Will, p67]
Bergson’s ideas change our way of thinking about the duration of this journey. There are a host of characters, stories and memories that are travelling with us – as real and influential on our experience as Niko the steward or the Captain. In some way, our ancestors are making this journey now, with us – and we are making it with them, then. The seascapes slide into one another: not a series of distinct scenes, but ever-changing and flowing, exactly the same and always different from yesterday, a year ago, a hundred years ago. We count the days, but we also stop counting. We give in to the idea that we will arrive when we arrive.
Rebecca Beinart
