The relativity of time, as another year slips away

TIME marches on, rushing through the seasons, dashing through the rain, plowing through the mist, blowing through the summer. I went to bed sometime around 1972 and awoke to 2006. Where did all my history go?

I contemplate the gap as I look out at a world freshly aglow from a surprising night of storm. It snuck into our presence after dark, casting diamonds across the chaparral and emeralds on the arid hillsides.

Now the day dawns in almost flawless blue with a clear sun illuminating what only moments before was masked by dark clouds. How did it change so quickly, shifting weather patterns in the snap of a cosmic nanosecond?

Where does the rain go when it’s gone?

I followed the wind once. I pursued it across an ocean, over a desert and into a corner of the forest. It was hiding in shadows, but I could hear it whispering ever so slightly at night, through the high mountain branches of the redwood trees.

This is another component of time’s puzzle, faking the mind into missing the years for the details of its passage. We concentrate on small lives and intriguing moments, and when we look up from autumn’s leaves or winter’s rain, years have passed and decades have flown by.

I knew a physicist in San Francisco whose sole purpose in life was to study time. He wanted to go beyond Einstein, to evaluate time emotionally and philosophically. He wanted to “understand” time, to slow its pace for a better look.

We discussed it endlessly over several drinks while the rest of those in our company, in another part of the room, talked sports or gardens or babies or politics or dogs or cars or business or hairdos or guns or schools or love.

“I just don’t understand it,” I remember him saying. His first name was Albert. It was so long ago, I don’t recall his last name. But I do remember being in his house, in a corner of his living room, hunched together, attempting to place in some perspective just exactly what it was that whitened our hair and tightened our bones.

“If we walked slower,” I asked him once, “would we live longer? I mean, if we slowed ourselves, would that slow the time that embraces our individual spaces?”

I don’t know if he ever answered the question. His expression would tighten into a half-frown, as though contemplating what had been said or defining it or wondering if it made any sense at all.

After a few drinks at a party everything seems brilliantly clear, if only for a moment. There is a flashing light that accompanies an epiphany and then the explosive conclusions of alcoholic talk: brilliance flowing down from someplace on high where it had, earlier that very same evening, been so elusive.

Albert was never that way. He was as confused during and after our Scotch-fueled conversations as he had been at the very start, even during the vague and surreal questions I fired at him, like, “Would time cease to be if we eliminated the calendar?” “Would it confuse time into slowing if we all walked backward?”

“Let me think about that,” Albert would say. But he never said if he had reached any conclusion. We’d just start all over the next time. I used to wonder if he had a lab somewhere or a large blackboard covered with equations or a roll-top desk where he perched like an old owl pondering the notions of a ticking clock. Someone said that Albert had died a few years back, that time had rolled right over him, or flown over him, or slipped over him like a passing cloud. Time had eaten Albert.

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” Satchel Paige said that. It’s a wondrous question, defying our notions of birthdays. How old is our body? Our brain? Our feet and our legs and our arms and our fingers and all the other parts that connect to form us? To form me? To form you?

If you feel that I am simply filling space today, you’re wrong. Newspaper space, I mean, not outer space or inner space or cyberspace or all of the other spaces we might have discovered. I am seriously contemplating that which has always baffled me, and which baffled Albert, fretting in his living room while time swirled about him.

I want to know exactly how long it takes wind to erode a mountain and water to carve out a valley, and I want to know why. What’s the purpose of a desert and why bother with it in the first place? Ask God? I have. He said he wasn’t sure. He said to ask Albert. But Albert is gone, a part of the stars, a leaf on the breeze, a sparkle in the surf, a speck floating along with the melodies of time.

If you figure any of this out, let me know. Write me or e-mail me or telephone me or just stick your head out the window and shout the answers, like the character in “Network” who was madder than hell and not going to take it anymore.

And then go back to greeting the new year as we always have, as long as we can remember, as long as a new year meant anything, as long as the concept existed, before calendars and clocks, when all we had were seasons. If all this makes no sense to you, that’s the way it should be. I’m just passing time. Rain is threatening the day again.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.