First Stage
As a boy, I was fascinated by speed, the wild range of speeds in the world around me. People moved at different speeds; animals much more so. The wings of insects moved too fast to see, though one could judge their frequency by the tone they emitted--a hateful noise, a high E, with mosquitoes, or a lovely bass hum with the fat bumblebees that flew around the hollyhocks each summer. Our pet tortoise, which could take an entire day to cross the lawn, seemed to live in a different time frame altogether. But what then of the movement of plants? I would come down to the garden in the morning and find the hollyhocks a little higher, the roses more entwined around their trellis, but, however patient I was, I could never catch them moving.
Experiences like this played a part in turning me to photography, because it allowed me to alter the rate of motion, speed it up, slow it down, so I could see, adjusted to a human perceptual rate, the details of movement or change otherwise beyond the power of the eye to register. Being fond of microscopes and telescopes--my older brothers, medical students and bird-watchers, kept theirs in the house--I thought of the slowing down or the speeding up of motion as a sort of temporal equivalent: slow motion as an enlargement, a microscopy of time, and speeded-up motion as a foreshortening, a telescopy of time.
I experimented with photographing plants. Ferns, in particular, had many attractions for me--not least in their tightly wound crosiers or fiddleheads, tense with contained time, like watch springs, with the future all rolled up in them. So I would set my camera on a tripod in the garden, and take photographs of fiddleheads at intervals of an hour; I would develop the negatives, print them up, and bind a dozen or so prints together in a little flick-book. And then, as if by magic, I could see the fiddleheads unfurl like the curled-up paper trumpets one blew into at parties, taking a second or two for what, in real time, took a couple of days.
Slowing down motion was not so easy as speeding it up, and here I depended on my cousin, a photographer, who had a cinecamera capable of taking more than a hundred frames per second. With this, I was able to catch the bumblebees at work, as they hovered in the hollyhocks, and to slow down their time-blurred wing beats so that I could see each up-and-down movement distinctly.
My interest in speed and movement and time, and in possible ways to make them appear faster or slower, made me take a special pleasure in two of H. G. Wells's stories, "The Time Machine" and "The New Accelerator," with their vividly imagined, almost cinematic descriptions of altered time.
"As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing," Wells's Time Traveller relates: I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. . . . The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. . . . Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of day and night merged into one continuous greyness . . . the jerking sun became a streak of fire . . . the moon a fainter fluctuating band. . . . I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour . . . huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed--melting and flowing under my eyes.
The opposite of this occurs in "The New Accelerator," the story of a drug which accelerates one's perceptions, thoughts, and metabolism several thousand times or so. Its inventor and the narrator, who have taken the drug together, wander out into a glaciated world, watching people like ourselves and yet not like ourselves, frozen in careless attitudes, caught in mid-gesture . . . and sliding down the air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid snail--was a bee.
"The Time Machine" was published in 1895, when there was intense interest in the new powers of photography and cinematography to reveal details of movements inaccessible to the unaided eye. Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist, had been the first to show that a galloping horse at one point had all four hooves off the ground. His work, as the historian Marta Braun brings out, was instrumental in stimulating Eadweard Muybridge's famous photographic studies of motion. Marey, in turn stimulated by Muybridge, went on to develop high-speed cameras which could slow and almost arrest the movements of birds and insects in flight; and, at the opposite extreme, to use time-lapse photography to accelerate the otherwise almost imperceptible movements of sea urchins, starfish, and other marine animals.
I wondered sometimes whether the speeds of animals and plants could be very different from what they were: how much they were constrained by internal limits, how much by external--the gravity of the earth, the amount of energy received from the sun, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and so on. So I was fascinated by yet another Wells story, "The First Men in the Moon," with its beautiful description of how the growth of plants was dramatically accelerated on a celestial body with only a fraction of the earth's gravity:
With a steady assurance, a swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. . . . The bundle-like buds swelled and strained and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips . . . that lengthened rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was slower than any animal's, swifter than any plant's I have ever seen before. How can I suggest it to you--the way that growth went on? . . . Have you ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew like that.
Here, as in "The Time Machine" and "The New Accelerator," the description was irresistibly cinematic, and made me wonder if the young Wells had seen, or experimented with, time-lapse photography of plants, as I had.
A few years later, when I was a student at Oxford, I read William James's "Principles of Psychology," and there, in a wonderful chapter on "The Perception of Time," I found this description:
We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Baer has indulged in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling-water springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny.
This was published in 1890, when Wells was a young biologist (and writer of biology texts). Could he have read James, or, for that matter, the original computations of Von Baer, from the eighteen-sixties? Indeed, one might say that a cinematographic model is implicit in all these descriptions, for the business of registering larger or smaller numbers of events in a given time is exactly what cinecameras do if they are run faster or slower than the usual twenty-four or so frames per second.
It is often said that time seems to go more quickly, the years rush by, as one grows older--either because when one is young one's days are packed with novel, exciting impressions or because as one grows older a year becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of one's life. But, if the years appear to pass more quickly, the hours and minutes do not--they are the same as they always were.
At least, they seem so to me (in my seventies), although experiments have shown that, while young people are remarkably accurate at estimating a span of three minutes by counting internally, elderly subjects apparently count more slowly, so that their perceived three minutes is closer to three and a half or four minutes. But it is still not clear that this phenomenon has anything to do with the existential or psychological feeling of time passing more quickly as one ages.
The hours and minutes still seem excruciatingly long when I am bored, and all too short when I am engaged. As a boy, I hated school, being forced to listen passively to droning teachers. When I looked at my watch surreptitiously, counting the minutes to my liberation, the minute hand, and even the second hand, seemed to move with infinite slowness. There is an exaggerated consciousness of time in such situations; indeed, when one is bored there may be no consciousness of anything but time.
In contrast were the delights of experimenting and thinking in the little chemical lab I set up at home, and here, on a weekend, I might spend an entire day in happy activity and absorption. Then I would have no consciousness of time at all, until I began to have difficulty seeing what I was doing, and realized that evening had come. When, years later, I read Hannah Arendt, writing in "The Life of the Mind" of "a timeless region, an eternal presence in complete quiet, lying beyond human clocks and calendars altogether . . . the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man. . . . This small non-time space in the very heart of time," I knew exactly what she was talking about.
