from "Borderliners"

B o r d e r l i n e r s

These are excerpts from "Borderliners" by Peter Hoeg, some sort of an explanation to how this webpage started.

"What is time? We ascended towards the light, five floors up, and split up into thirteen rows facing the god who unlocks the gates of morning."

"Theorist of time are seldom in agreement. However, they do agree that there are two possible ways of viewing the passage of time: that everything is in a state of constant and unrecognisable change. And that everything remains unchanged.

Linear time has to be envisaged as a huge, endless knife-blade scraping its way across the universe, and drawing it along with it. In its wake it leaves an endless broad stripe of past time, ahead of it lies the future, on the knife-edge lies the present, in which we live.

Circular time sees the world as remaining more or less the same. With the changes around us being, or leading to, repetition. These two perceptions of time have been almost predominant throughout history, up to our own century. Where a modified version of linear time is now said, by the experts, to be correct."

"I believe that virtually all of the existing books on time, deep down, are certain, that time is linear. That it passes, and is then, irrevocably, gone."

"The life of every person possesses a linear trait. All of us are born, grow up, live, and end up being destroyed. In various ways, to be sure - some in holes in the ground, others in children's homes or at the Academy of Sciences in New York. But for each of us, birth, death and growing up are unique events that come round once, and once only, and can never be repeated - at any rate, not just like that. Their time is linear. As if you were moving along a straigth line - each point you came past would be one you had never passed before and never would that same point come again.

And yet, life is full of repetition. Every day I install myself in the laboratory. This is the prerequisite for the experiment. If it is ever to be brought to a conclusion, this act must be repeated a great many times. In a way, time around the laboratory is cyclic.

So, too, with the body. Every second it dies a little, while still maintaining and regenerating itself. With every second it ensures the infinite regularity of breathing and pulse - rhythms which can still, at the same time, be altered, increase and culminate in fear and panic and ecstasy, only once more to seek equilibrium. And which now and then - when the woman and the child are nearby, or after working in the laboratory, or for some other reason - for fleeting moments, can result in cycles of perfect harmony, one steady, mathematically regular swing.

In the life of every person, on every conceivable plane, an uninterrupted chain of both cyclic and linear traits can be found, identical re-enactments and unique, one-off occurrences.

There you have a contradiction in terms."

"Measurement of linear time gains ground in Europe. In real terms, it is only three hundred years old, everything else merely leads up to it. It appears when society begins to change so fast that each new day is no longer recognisable, because it has become too different from the day before. Time measurement appears as society grows more complex, it appears along with communications, the postal service, finance and trade, and with the railways.

For this, various explanations are given. It is said that time appears with the desire of the middle classes, together with science, to liberate themselves from the aristocracy and religion."

That, of course, is how it must have been, that must be a key element in the explanation. Whatever an explanation might be. But it is as though there is something else."

"There must be something deeper and greater than the historical explanation. It is as though these scientists and philosophers, people with power and knowledge in Wester civilisations, all have something in common. As though none of them could stand the darkness, did not want to know doubt and uncertainty. Were, within themselves, unable to cope with unresolved contradictions. And so they have tried to eliminate them."

"They (Helmholtz and Kant) had insisted that it is impossible to perceive the reality that surrounds us - or to perceive ourselves - any way other than through the senses. And the senses are not passive receivers of reality, they process it. That which we perceive is heavily processed. So there is no point in talking about an actual reality, that outside of ourselves. That we have no knowledge of. What we know is an edited version. Biology can concentrate on studying the way in which our sensory apparatus is constructed, how it edits. And how the consciousness of other living creatures operates as compared to our own."

"Once you have realised that there is no objective external world to be found, that what you know is only a filtered and processed version, then it is a short step to the thought that, in that case, other people too are nothing but a processed shadow, and but a short step more to the belief that every person must somehow be shut away, isolated behind their own unreliable sensory apparatus. And then the thought springs easily to mind, that man is, fundamentally, alone. That the world is made up of disconnected consciousness, floating in a featureless vacuum."

"...examine the way in which time, as an entity, is maintained collectively by people" ... "describing the rules governing collective awareness, coexistence, in a way that no one has ever done before."

"You read what they have written, and it is like a friend reaching out a hand to you, even though you will never get to meet them."

"When I was isolated for a long time, or had stopped talking, or got brushed by the train or lay and waited for Valsang, or sat close to Katarina, or held August's hand, then time faded away, like a sound growing fainter. When I was heading away from the world and into my self, or in death or surrender or ecstasy, or in the silence here in the laboratory, then time departed from me. Then eternity drew near."

"Time is not an illusion. Nor is it the only reality. It is one possible, widespread form of encounters between the mind and the surrounding world. But not the only possible one. If you are driven by curiosity, or if you are ill and cannot survive any other way, then you can enter the laboratory and touch time. And then it will change."

"Linear time is unavoidable, it is one way of hanging on to the past. ... And what I am writing here, this part of my life, is also remembered in this way. ... The mind also remembers stretches, fluid passages, connections between what has once happened and what is happening now, regardless of the passage of time. And farthest back, the mind remembers a timeless plain."

"Time is made up of many different states of consciousness, of symbols from human life."

"In its simplest form, it is the indescribable combination of recognition and surprise that arises when the mind encounters the movement of the world. It is the acknowledgment of the fact that, in every change, there is something never before seen, something unique and irreversible, and something that always remains the same."

"You see, for you, yourself, life is in fact irrevocable. When your problems wre so great that they piled up until finally you could only see yourself - or not even that - then life ran away from you, through your fingers, like sand.

But if you stand back from yourself, for example because the child helped you, then you see the repetition: then you begin to see that you are only one transitory link in chains of almighty circuits; that you were not, after all, important, not because you were worthless - you were not, even though you were small you were important - but because the great repetitions are so much bigger and more important."

"I have woken in the night, the child has kicked off her duvet, I do not know whether she has been too warm or has been afraid of being hemmed in. I have laid the duvet across her legs alone, that way at least she will not be cold and if she becomes desperate she can free herself in a second. Then I have not been able to get back to sleep, I have sat in the dark and looked at them both, the child and the woman. And the feeling has become too much. It is not sorrow or joy; it is the weight and the pressure of having been brought into their lives, and of knowing that if one were ever to be separated from them, it would mean your obliteration."

The very first time I was there was in March, almost two years ago. The weather was exceptionally good, we had a nice walk up to the fort and a picnic. I remember the sunset very clearly, as I was sitting in the grass, looking straight into the setting Sun across the bay, a tiny wish came true. I remember it getting dark and us moving to the pub in the harbour, sitting close to the fireplace (real wood burning), drinking irish coffee (never since) and playing Magic till it was time to drive back, a rather long and silent drive back to Dublin.

The next visit was too real, or maybe my expectations were too high. I don't even try to recall the tourists and the bad youth hostel, that we had just enough time to walk around in those small streets, got sunburnt during the visit in the fort. Maybe the drive, this time early in the morning, was something to remember. Rabbits and hedgehogs all over the place, a muddy riverbank (probably affected by the tides and ebbs of the sea) and the breaking of dawn.

We were literally speeding through the country to see as many sights as possible in just three days. Once you reach the western coast, time comes to a standstill. The cliffs, the Burren. We got out of the car to walk down as close to the sea as possible. Those rocks there, some unbelievable shade of grey with small plants growing everywhere in the narrow cracks, so far below you cannot see.

The sudden silence made me want to stop for a while. To go to one of the small villages there for a week, rent a bike or go hiking to explore the area down to small details. To have time to sit idly, thinking about nothing in particular. To get up at sunrise with her, wash in cold water from the well and eat home-made bread with fresh butter and grow fruit and vegetables in the garden, like back when I was 10-12 and the summer was free.

You can write or stay a while.