Are physicists the only folks who wonder about the nature of time? Admittedly, my education prepared me more to spell ‘physicists’ than to share their thought processes, but it seems reasonable to think about one of the fundamental forces that govern our lives. On the other hand, maybe somebody will find out how badly I did in high school science and disqualify me. Feel free to give up on this little essay. I just write ghost stories.

From the beginning, though, my take on the supernatural was entangled with my interest in time. Requiem for Thursday actually had a different working title. I called it ‘The House that Remembered Thursday’.  Common sense prevailed and I was advised that my original title was too long for the cover. All the same, memory remained at the centre of the story, or to put it another way, the passage of time. In the grand tradition of science fiction writing, I asked the question, ‘what if time were to stop passing in a single room?’ and that was the genesis of the novel.

The scientific consensus is that space and time are a continuum. Men and women with chalk dust on their leather elbow patches toss around the phrase ‘space/time’. Personally, I’m only qualified to comment on whether ‘space/time’ is in fact technically a phrase. (And I haven’t a clue.) I hope physicists still use chalk boards, by the way. It would destroy another of my cherished romantic notions if they use markers on a whiteboard. If they use styluses on a big screen, I’ll be crushed.

I’m sure you can tell this is a closely argued scientific paper. I was talking about time and space, and through shrewd observation I have noticed that you can stop in one place in space. My downstairs washroom, for instance. I know I spend a lot of time there. But, although my wife might disagree, time continues to pass while I’m in there. A lot of it, in fact. 

The fact of the matter is that while you can stop at one spot in space, you can’t stop at one spot in time. There have certainly been times when I wished I could. Just this morning I had a sugar cookie oat latte at Starbucks. I had hopes that that moment would last longer than it did, but again, physicists tell us that could only happen if the force of gravity in the coffee shop were to be crushingly strong. Time passes more slowly in environments with high gravity, you see, but the baristas wouldn’t like that.

In practical terms, ‘now’ just doesn’t last; it’s always there, separating those things in our lives that we can’t change (high school gym class) from things that we can change (our Netflix subscription).

Of course neither the past or the future is real. Gym class is a memory. (Trauma, nightmare, ordeal; take your pick) while cancelling Netflix is a mere aspiration. The chalk dust folks tell us that looking at faraway objects amounts to looking back in time. Does that mean if I was looking this way from Alpha Centauri, gym class, God forbid, would still be happening? Now there’s a horror story for you. For me, running around a cinder track in shorts was like Sisyphus pushing a giant rock up a slope. Except that Sisyphus, according to Albert Camus, was happy. I sure wasn’t.

Sorry. I really didn’t want this to be about gym class. That would seriously hurt my chances of getting this paper published in ‘Physics Today’. But just for fun, what if you saw someone one day who was definitely a visitor from the past—say they were wearing leg warmers, or a baseball hat the right way round. And what if this person was solid and cast a shadow? How could this happen? Aha, this is where I come in, fully qualified to spin a story out of befuddlement. Not that I took any actual courses in befuddlement. They always seemed to conflict with Metaphysical Poetry or Shakespearean Tragic Love Themes.

The British SciFi author John Wyndham looked at this problem of folks showing up out of their time period, but the other way around. He imagined a future in which time travel had become commonplace. Tourists from the future would show up on our streets, staring at us as if we were relics of the past, which, in this case, we were. In Wyndham’s story, this intrusion from the nosy future only ended when the time travellers were mobbed with people like us staring back at them. There’s something about that impass that appeals to me. It’s sort of like temporal gridlock, with a bunch of people unstuck in time staring at one another in mutual incomprehension. I’ve seen much the same thing at the intersection of Guelph Line and New Street. There would be nothing to do in this situation but honk.

I want to remind you that I’m going on about time because it’s one of the reasons that I chose to write ghost stories. Ghost stories, after all are about collisions between the present and the past. How about this for a great ghost story idea? A ghost from the mid fifties somehow materializes at a cruise night at the local mall. That’s one of those things where enthusiasts show up with their pristine Buick 88’s and Studebakers, play fifties rock music, and dress in poodle skirts, or jeans turned up at the bottom. The nub of the story is, the poor ghost could wander about for an hour, wondering what all these people were doing looking at cars. ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ he would wonder.

I suppose writing ghost stories is about as useful as winding sundials, but I’ve always been drawn to them. The stories, I mean. Not the sundials. At the heart of every ghost story is the feeling of creepiness. That’s a technical term we professionals use. Maybe in the nineteenth century the creepiness of ghost stories derived from readers worrying about their immortal souls. In the presence of a ghost you would wonder about whether the ghost was trapped on earth by his sins, and whether he was in some sort of purgatory. After all, the Victorian and Edwardian ghost story was a product of the American civil war and the horrendous loss of life that ensued. Spiritualism and séances were a way people had of coping with the sheer prevalence of death around them.

What about today? Maybe the ghost story can be a way of helping us think about the conundrum that modern science has placed before us. For me, the ghostly encounter would be about the very nature of reality. I’d wonder if the spectre was arisen from another kind of ‘now’—a version of the past that’s still, in some way, happening.