St Anselm's Senior Common Room, Late Morning
Rain tapped gently at the windows. A coal fire murmured in the grate. Professor Quillibrace sat with an expression of severe neutrality over a cup of tea that had long since ceased to contribute meaningfully to the concept of warmth.
Miss Elowen Stray sat opposite with notebook open.
Mr Blottisham had arrived carrying a newspaper beneath his arm and the unmistakable confidence of a man approaching a subject he understood entirely and incorrectly.
He lowered himself into a chair.
"Time," he announced, "is perfectly straightforward."
Quillibrace looked up.
"How comforting."
Blottisham nodded.
"It is merely an invisible sort of road. We move along it. Yesterday is behind us. Tomorrow lies ahead. Very simple."
Miss Stray tilted her head.
"We do speak that way."
"We all speak that way," said Blottisham triumphantly. "Which rather settles matters."
Quillibrace stirred his tea absent-mindedly.
"Human beings also once spoke of the sun moving around the Earth."
Blottisham frowned.
"That seems different."
"It often does."
A pause followed.
Quillibrace placed down his spoon.
"The curious thing," he said, "is that the image of time as a sort of invisible landscape has become so familiar that it no longer appears to us as an image."
Miss Stray nodded slowly.
"We treat it as simple description."
"Precisely."
Blottisham waved a hand.
"Because it is description. Things happen in time."
Quillibrace glanced at him.
"'In' is doing suspiciously large amounts of work there."
Blottisham looked mildly offended.
"What else should things happen in?"
"That," said Quillibrace, "is exactly the question."
Miss Stray leaned forward.
"So we imagine time as a container?"
"Yes."
Quillibrace folded his hands.
"Time exists independently. Moments are locations within it. Events occupy those locations. History stretches itself across the whole structure."
Blottisham looked pleased.
"Excellent. I was right."
"I did not say the picture was correct."
Blottisham sighed.
Quillibrace continued.
"The structure is quietly borrowed from space. We understand objects occupying positions in space, so we project the same arrangement onto temporal experience."
"Moments become places," said Miss Stray.
"Indeed."
"And events become objects moving through those places."
"Exactly."
Blottisham crossed his arms.
"I still fail to detect a problem."
Quillibrace regarded him thoughtfully.
"Very well. Let us locate the present."
Blottisham blinked.
"The present is... now."
"Excellent. How large is it?"
Blottisham frowned.
"What do you mean?"
"If the present has duration, then one may divide that duration again. If it possesses no duration at all, then it becomes difficult to understand how anything occupies it."
Blottisham stared.
"Hm."
Miss Stray looked down at her notes.
"So perhaps the difficulty isn't merely identifying the present."
Quillibrace nodded.
"Perhaps the difficulty lies in treating moments as things."
Blottisham looked unhappy.
Quillibrace continued calmly.
"And there is a second curiosity."
"Oh dear."
"We also say that time flows."
Blottisham brightened.
"Yes! Quite right."
Quillibrace folded his arms.
"Relative to what?"
Silence.
Blottisham stared.
"What?"
"Movement normally occurs across time. An object changes position at different times."
"Yes."
"So if time itself moves..."
Blottisham's expression began to contract inward.
"...then through what does it move?"
Miss Stray looked up slowly.
"Another time."
"Quite."
"And then that time would require another."
"Precisely."
Blottisham stared into the middle distance.
"Oh no."
The fire cracked softly.
At length Miss Stray spoke.
"So the difficulty isn't that the picture lacks details."
"No."
Quillibrace nodded.
"The difficulty may be structural."
He leaned back slightly.
"The picture turns relations into objects."
"Events become things in moments," said Miss Stray quietly.
"Moments become things in time."
"And time itself becomes another thing behind them all."
Quillibrace smiled faintly.
"Exactly."
Blottisham sat motionless.
Then:
"...I dislike where this is going."
Quillibrace ignored him.
"Suppose instead that change comes first."
Miss Stray looked interested.
"Meaning that temporal order emerges from relations among actualisations?"
"Quite so."
Blottisham looked alarmed.
"You cannot simply remove time."
"No one has removed anything."
Quillibrace reached for his tea.
"Clocks continue ticking. Tuesdays remain regrettably frequent."
Blottisham relaxed slightly.
"But events would no longer occupy positions in some invisible temporal landscape."
Miss Stray was already writing.
"Time becomes a construal emerging from changing relations."
Quillibrace nodded.
"The inversion is small."
"And rather large at the same time."
"Yes."
Silence settled for a moment.
Rain traced faint lines against the windows.
Miss Stray looked thoughtful.
"So the past and future stop being places."
"They become orientations."
"And the present..."
Quillibrace smiled faintly.
"...becomes the ongoing edge at which potential becomes actualised."
Mr Blottisham stared at the fire for a very long time.
Finally he said:
"I've just had a troubling thought."
Quillibrace looked up.
"Yes?"
Blottisham frowned.
"If clocks do not measure the movement of time..."
He looked around nervously.
"...what exactly have I been late for all these years?"
Quillibrace considered this.
"Relations, Mr Blottisham."
A pause.
"Entirely relations."
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