Paris Spacetime
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
Time and space are intimately related.
Einstein quantified the link. While he waited on experimental results to confirm his special theory of relativity, Maxwell, Michelson, Morley, Lorenz and Poincaré had already done the heavy lifting. There was little doubt in 1905 that the velocity of light was a fundamental constant of nature that would be the same on our slowly moving earth or on another planet, at the edge of the universe, hurtling near light speed, with its own Einstein. Consequences be damned, both Einsteins must have thought, should time and space need conform to the demands of light.
Shakespeare qualified the link. Long before Einstein’s revelation and Freud’s psychology, he intuitively understood the elastic demands our sentience places on time and space when he had Rosalind tell Orlando that: "…. Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal."
Yet the small, black travel clock on my desk is impervious to such demands, relentlessly ticking off 60 seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the hour whether I watch it or not, unaffected by my mind’s place in time and space, until I pick it up with my left hand, twirl its dial with my right, and am transported to my older son’s time in Tokyo or my younger son’s time in Philadelphia or to the time in Paris where the Eiffel Tower points, in the distance, past buildings and trees, as sidewalk cafés begin to fill, all chairs turned outward so even when empty they follow passersby.
My wife and I walk past one café and another, she trying to decide where to eat, I trying to organize my French to properly ask for a table for two, the menu, the food, the wine, the check, without sounding like the American struggling with his French that I avoided 30 years ago when I lived in Paris.
I ask for a table; the waiter answers me in English. Is it so obvious? I grimace telling myself to be patient, wishing that he had given me more time and hadn’t been so smug. My mind is a tangled knot of fatigue as I scan the menu more concerned about which language to speak than what I want to eat.
Time trotted as my wife and I prepared to leave on vacation, and it galloped as the plane lifted off the runway heading towards Paris, and it ambled as we perused our travel documents wondering what we would do first after first taking a nap in our hotel room, and then, as the seats in front cut off all circulation to our legs and as our bottoms became sore with sitting and as our food caused indigestion and as we tired of reading and channel surfing the video screens that touched our noses, time stood still and we wondered if we would ever arrive – until - the plane began to descend, and time galloped as I prepared to find our way on the RER train to Paris past old apartment buildings that were new when I last saw them, past small vacant lots full with suburban detritus, past walls defaced by graffiti that I couldn’t remember seeing before though time and space had now compressed old events into a diffusely remembered yesterday, and we plunged into the underground and lugged our luggage to and through the mole-tunneled Métro and finally walked up the stairs into the bright sunlight, narrow streets and sparkling buildings of the 7th Arrondissement.
"Wow," said my wife in a reverential whisper, seeing Paris for the first time.
"Choisi?" – Ready to order? the waiter asks me and I answer in French, happy for a second chance.
As the light fades, we make our way towards la Tour. The evening is brisk and clear and the dirt path easy to follow behind others whose time also ambles as we walk slowly toward the same destination that grows larger and more brilliant, a prominent torch in a city struggling to keep a low profile save for Gustave Eiffel’s 300-meter, open-lattice, wrought-iron tower built, in just a few months, with just a small work force, for the Centennial Exposition of 1889.
We stand next to it and look up. We stand underneath it. We walk across the Seine and look back at it.
Space is invariant. Time stands still.
"Ow," I say as something fluttering smacks the top of my head.
"Bob?" my wife asks looking up at me expectantly.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com