A philosophical idea that can help us understand why time crawls slowly during the corona epidemic

Many people feel that their experience of time has been a bit problematic this year. Although the clocks are ticking as they should, days stretch and months seem to drag on forever. We all know there are 60 seconds in a minute but 2020 has made us all aware of how we can experience the passage of time a little differently

By: Matthias Morbeck, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Durham University. Translated by Avi Blizovsky

Many people feel that their experience of time has been a bit problematic this year. Although the clocks are ticking as they should, days stretch and months seem to drag on forever. We all know there are 60 seconds in a minute but 2020 has made us all aware of how we can experience the passage of time a little differently.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who was somewhat of a celebrity in his time, came up with an idea that can help us understand why time felt so strange in the sleep of la durée plague.

Bergson claimed that time has two faces. The first facet of time is "objective time": the time of clocks, calendars, train schedules. The second, la durée ("duration"), is "living time", the time of our inner volitional experience. This is the time they felt, lived and acted.

live in our time

Bergson noticed that we mostly don't notice "duration". We don't need "objective time" is much more useful. But we can get a glimpse of the difference between them when they are out of sync.

The objective time segment between 15:00 and 16:00 is the same as between 20:00 and 21:00. But it doesn't have to be that way with la durée. If the first part is spent waiting at the dentist's office and the second at a party, we know that the first hour goes by slowly and the second just goes by too fast.

An example of what Bergson must have loved can be found in a very unlikely place, the animated film AntZ. In a short scene in the middle of the film, two ants cling to a boy's shoes. The two-minute sequence involves them talking to each other while the child takes four or five single steps.

In the scene, talking takes place in normal time while the steps take place in slow motion. The filmmakers managed to compress two different speeds into one sequence: the boy walks in slow motion, while the ants talk in real time. All this is difficult to understand if we took a stopwatch and noted the exact location of the shoes and the content of the ants' conversations. "Objective time" is simply not relevant to the description of the scene: the galloping of the ants is really important to the viewer.

Epidemic slows down

If we change our focus from "objective time" to la durée, we can put our finger on the feeling of strangeness around time this year.

It's not just that for many la durée slowed down during the summer lockdown (in the UK, but it's relevant to every second lockdown) relatively without restriction.

For Bergson, no two moments of la durée can be the same. The arrival of a train at a certain moment of objective time is always the same. But our past emotions and memories affect our present experience of time. People who were lucky and didn't have to deal with the negative effects of the corona epidemic, felt a sense of "renewal" in the first closure: sales of sports equipment rose sharply, some started learning languages, others started making bread. The reason we want to get into that mindset now is that the memory of the first closure was good. Countless yoga mats ended up in the closet because we remember how tired we were of staying indoors.

For Bergson, the "speed" of la durée is also related to human interpretation, which is always influenced by subjective and specific memories of the past and shaped by anticipation of the future. The epidemic has distorted both ideas of the past and the future in ways that "objective time" cannot contain. If we now look into the past, we realize that trying to remember exactly how many months ago the fires raged in Australia is quite difficult, but it was this year and before the corona virus.

We are stuck in the present

Similarly, if we look forward to the future, our feelings about the stretch of time from now to the future are distorted. When will we go on vacation? How long will it be until we see our loved ones? Without signs of objective time, we feel that time passes - but because nothing happens, it passes much more slowly and we are stuck in the present. If we knew for sure that the world would return to normal in three months, la durée would pass more quickly. But since we don't know, time passes slowly even though we may eventually return to normal in that objective period.

In 1891, Bergson married the cousin of the writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922), whose writing was strongly shaped by Bergson's philosophy. Frost's "The Search for Lost Time"—the longest novel ever written—illustrates la durée's ability to contract and expand, regardless of objective time. As we read, the progression of Frost's life time gives a natural feel. Still, each volume in the novel takes place in a different "objective" time: some volumes span years, others only a few days, despite the fact that they are all about the same length.

The Corona year was very similar. The time of calendars that measure days and weeks has become irrelevant - the present has taken over our lives.

If we accept Bergson's more controversial claim that only la durée is "real" and objective time is merely an external construction imposed on our lives, the plague could be said to have given everyone an insight into the fundamental nature of time.

For an article in The Conversation

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Einstein's perspective, or Schrödinger's mermaid
• The arrow of time and the Archimedes point are new directions for the physics of time
• The way the brain deals with information that is not synchronized in time