Flexitime

[chrispenycate]

We all live in elastic time – subjective time is subject to modification.

Objective time? Well, since caesium clocks, quartz oscillators, tuning forks, pendulums, cuckoo clocks, the moons of Jupiter and Swiss accountants all agree more or less on the cosmic metronome I suppose Occam's razor gives us a good probability of absolute time, at least locally (unlike my dragons for whom duration depends on temperature, and winter is much shorter than summer)

Whether or not the universal tick exists, no living being experiences it. Every Chrons inhabitant knows the difference in time required to boil an egg when you are in the room with it or outside is multiplies if you should take thirty seconds relief in the smallest room. This holds for all physical phenomena, and most computer based activities. Although it generally obeys the rules specified in the law of the perversity of the inanimate, it is in fact an independent effect, and persists even when it's not annoying.

Writers use elastic time, too, but in the opposite direction. Who but a novelist could suggest that a lovers' tryst, passing at a speed a jet fighter would be jealous of, could last longer than the eternal walk to get to it, stuffed with anticipation and apprehension, and the period preceding the walk, where clothes are changed three times, teeth are scrubbed as many, while sun and fossilised clock hand refuse to advance? That the hour-long charge of the enemy toward you, while you can do nothing but wait, lasts less than the few seconds of strobe-clear images of death and dismemberment following, while the sun is inexplicably moved across half the sky?

But something else edits time like that; memory, inverting the stretch and contraction of natural subjective history; memory. In your souvenirs that first brush of lip on lip, so much more evocative than the sweaty biological exercise later on in the affair, lasts far longer than the half second objectivity would assign it, while the hours spent preparing end on the cutting room floor. The sensations fed into your brain's TBR file during the chaos of the battle are unzipped into pictures of friends and enemies reduced to bloody anomnity around you, while you go on, doing it to them before they can do it to you, then leave it to your flexible memory to remove the time spent in the field hospital as your wounds slowly knit back, and your body gets ready to do the same stupid thing all over again.

That's why tale-telling is generally in past tense; we are accustomed to the past in our memories (and what other true past is there?) being edited more interesting, cutting the commercial breaks (although, with the ratio of cut to kept, it's more cutting out the boring old program material, and keeping the loud, bright commercials) while the present is slow, and loaded with unnecessary detail. If Tolkien had written TLotR in subjective time, or even in objective, he wouldn't have kept a reader past Bree. Present tense is most effective when actions are falling over each other to be experienced; the sort of situation where, in 'real life', there is no time to analyse what you are feeling, or even feel it in great depth, otherwise it tends towards 'dear diary' fragmentation, with the 'I'm doing this now, and now this, and how come you can't detect the three boring weeks between the two of them, and the boring and uneventful transcontinental flight that no-one tried ti hijack?

So, now I've got four types of time: – Subjective time, objective time, remembered time and recounted time – and the only one which can pertain to more than one person is 'objective' (those two lovers we met earlier are sharing a lot of things, maybe even bodily fluids, but not the passage of time. In that river, each man is an island.

Remembered time will flow and ebb, depending on distance from the event, the people you are with, the smell of a particular dish, a thousand factors resisting rational analysis; seen through a rippling water lens, different elements magnified at different moments.

But memory's time stream can be disciplined, ordered by the recounted stream. When you start telling the story, and repeating it, the words themselves, be they poetry or prose, start to form patterns, fragments of flow that sound right, and conjoin to ever greater rivers of meaning, etching their passage into the bedrock of reality, making permanent structures out of shifting sand and gravel of remembered experience, and after, the word is truth, because it has defined truth. And that, without the necessity of experiencing it personally, is what writers are attempting to do.

[Interference]

Also Imaginary time (when you think it's Tuesday on a Wednesday) and Parallel time (when your boss says "Isn't it finished yet?" and you feel like you only just started it)

[Nik]

Don't forget Adrenaline Time can stretch that glimpse of ceiling or sky long enough to do a half-decent breakfall...

Hey, it was only a *hairline* Colles fracture...

[The Judge]

Perhaps both off-shoots of subjective time, but there's Athletes-in-the-Zone Time and its exact opposite Artists-in-the-Zone time. Athletes, when playing well, have a sense of expanded time -- a batsman** can see the ball for longer, even against a top-class bowler**, so time is stretched for them. Artists, when fully immersed, lose all track of time and emerge hours later bewildered that so many hours have passed, so time has contracted for them.

** for the benefit of any passing Americans, for batsman read (kind of) batter; for bowler (less kind of) pitcher. Only better dressed. Slightly.

[Peter Graham]

And don't forget Hammer Time.

You can't touch this (although in all fairness, you probably wouldn't want to).

Peter

[2ndchance]

Then you have, my time, which is endless, due to my retirement at 52, what?

Then you have fishing time, which is dependant on the wife's nod...

Not Phishing, which we do on here when seeking a compliment!!! (maybe too much of a word-play, inter --- net phishing, hmmm)

[TheEndIsNigh]

Short time. (that we all have left)

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by Peter Graham

And don't forget Hammer Time.

Not to confuse with Hammerspace.

[MeriPie]

The most subjective time has got to be dinnertime. When you should be doing something else (I'm thinking mainly here of revising for exams or writing an essay that's due in in 12 hours' time) then the amount of time you decide is reasonable to spend on dinner is exponentially inversely proportionate to how much time you have left to finish the work, and multiplied by how important the work is.

If you're still eating, it's still dinnertime. If that requires eating a grain of rice at a time, then so be it.