Today’s newsletter is about “solar returns” and revisiting old work.
Here’s Richard Linklater in the documentary Dream is Destiny, talking about the non-linear nature of time:
You don’t want to come back to this exact same spot, but you can’t help it through life. It’s a spiral. You know? You kind of come back to a new spot. You’re farther down the line, but you’re in a similar position.
You can read the rest here.
In the comments of my “spring bouquet” newsletter, Ann Collins, writer of the newsletter Microseasons, wrote:
At certain times of the year, I feel like time is both— linear and circular! And that is what has sparked my fascination with the ancient idea of 72 microseasons —each lasting just 5 days. Five days seems like a linear, human-sized, tangible amount of time. Yet the small linear segments are part of a larger Circle of an entire year, which is, in turn, part of a larger Spiral made of many years.
I really like this. (I follow @smallseasonsbot on twitter to remind me of these seasons.)
On this image of circular vs. linear time: It made me think about how if you draw a circle in Photoshop and keep zooming in, eventually the circle will look something like a straight line or (depending on the resolution) a series of steps:
Ann also sent me Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, “Answers to Letters”:
Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years may be passed in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past there on the other side.
I could probably talk about moving in a straight line in curved spacetime, but I wouldn’t really know what I was talking about. (Think of the way the earth seems pretty darned flat when you’re driving across Texas.)
Ann’s great point remains: In the micro sense, time usually feels linear — like a line of weekdays on a calendar. But in the macro sense, say, revisiting your notebooks over many years, it often feels circular.
In her latest newsletter, Ann Friedman linked to a twitter thread about how people see the passage of time, an essay about calendar synaesthesia, and this passage from Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 novel Flights:
Once we’re on the bus, she sets out her theory of time. She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique, no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.
In Keep Going, I advocate for a return to circular time — thinking of the creative life as more of a loop, or a spiral:
The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.”
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