17 June 1905
It is Tuesday morning in Berne. The thick-fingered baker on Marktgasse is
shouting at a woman who has not paid her last bill, is flailing his arms
while she quietly puts her new purchase of zweiback in her bag. Outside
the baker's shop, a child is skating after a ball tossed from a
first-floor window, the child's skates clicking on the stone street. On
the east end of Marktgasse, where the street joins Kramgasse, a man and
woman are standing close in the shadow of an arcade. Two men are walking
past with newspapers under their arms. Three hundred meters to the south,
a warbler is flying lazily over the Aare.
The world stops.
The baker's mouth halts in mid-sentence. The child floats in mid-stride,
the ball hangs in the air. The man and woman become statues under the
arcade. The two men become statues, their conversation stopped as if the
needle of a phonograph had been lifted. The bird freezes in flight, fixed
like a stage prop suspended over the river.
A microsecond later, the world starts again.
The baker continues his harangue as if nothing had happened. So, too, the
child races after the ball. The man and woman press closer together. The
two men continue debating the rise in the beef market. The bird flaps its
wings and continues its arc over the Aare.
Minutes later, the world stops again. Then starts again. Stops.
Starts.
What world is this? In this world time is not continuous. In this world
time is discontinuous. Time is a stretch of nerve fibers: seemingly
continuous from a distance but disjointed close up, with microscopic gaps
between fibers. Nervous action flows through one segment of time,
abruptly stops, pauses, leaps through a vacuum, and resumes in the
neighboring segment.
So tiny are the disconnections in time that a single second would have to
be magnified and dissected into one thousand parts and each of those parts
into one thousand parts before a single missing part of time could be
spotted. So tiny are the disconnections in time that the gaps between
segments are practically imperceptible. After each restart of time, the
new world looks just like the old. The positions and motions of clouds
appear exactly the same, the trajectories of birds, the flow of
conversations, thoughts.
The segments of time fit together almost perfectly, but not quite
perfectly. On occasion, very slight displacements occur. For example, on
this Tuesday in Berne, a young man and a young woman, in their late
twenties, stand beneath a street lamp on Gerberngasse. They met one month
ago. He loves her desperately, but he has already been crushed by a woman
who left him without warning, and he is frightened of love. He must be
sure with this woman. He studies her face, pleads silently for her true
feelings, searches for the smallest sign, the slightest movement of her
brow, the vaguest reddening of her cheeks, the moistness of her eyes.
In truth, she loves him back, but she cannot put her love in words.
Instead, she smiles at him, unaware of his fear. As they stand beneath
the street lamp, time stops and restarts. Afterwards, the tilt of their
heads is precisely the same, the cycle of their heartbeats shows no
alteration. But somewhere in the deep pools of the woman's mind, a dim
thought has appeared that was not there before. The young woman reaches
for this new thought, into her unconscious, and as she does so a gossamer
vacancy crosses her smile. This slight hesitation would be invisible to
any but the closest scrutiny, yet the urgent young man has noticed it and
taken it for his sign. He tells the young woman that he cannot see her
again, returns to his small apartment on Zeughausgasse, decides to move to
Zurich and work in his uncle's bank. The young woman walks slowly home
from the lamppost on Gerberngasse and wonders why the young man did not
love her.
