Time, what a concept: Stories of Your Life and Dark in the time of covid-19
CONTAINS SPOILERS: Arrival, Stories of Your Life, Dark (Netflix series).
A lot of my friends have been saying this period makes time feel meaningless. Every other day is indistinguishable from anther, feeling like this-
A tweet my friend showed me summed it up well, saying how isolation has turned time into solely 3 days: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Another variation of before, now, and later - or past, present, and future.
In a strange alignment of stars and planets, I feel like the content I’ve consumed since being in quarantine delves into the concept of time in its own peculiarly similar way. They all break the popular mold that time is linear, revealing the delicate interconnectedness of these three stages of time in novel and heartbreaking ways.
The first is a short story called Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I didn’t know that it inspired the movie Arrival, but after reading only a page or two the similarity is unmistakable. If you enjoyed Arrival, I highly recommend reading its source material, as it was able to convey ideas and emotions in written form that I didn’t get from the movie. Like Arrival, it’s slowly revealed that the alien language Louise Banks is mastering teaches her to see into the future, seeing tragic personal events unfold. Despite a heightened knowledge of what is about to happen, Louise cannot stop an awful tragedy in her future. In fact, knowledge of the tragedy plays a part in its actualization.
Breaking from the movie, the short story goes further in emphasizing the past and the now, giving them as much importance as knowing the future. It’s more explicit in showing that the heptapod language enables the speaker to look at time in a different perspective, from an almost bird’s-eye view, seeing the past, present, and future as one. These are my favorite excerpts to sum this idea up:
Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying all.
What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.
What a beautifully eerie way to see the world. Imagine knowing exactly what was going to happen, and despite the good and bad you see, being able to do nothing to change it – in fact, playing an active role in enabling it to become reality. What would that mean for our individual freedom? Chiang shares his stance clearly:
Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future…
I’ve thought about this idea of free will and its context with the global pandemic lately. Countries like China received a lot of criticism for taking extreme action to contain the virus. Western nations even commented on how such measures would impede on their freedom (read: mess with their epic spring break plans in Florida). But imagine knowing that the easiest way to curb covid-19’s spread is to stay home and still not doing it because your ‘freedom’ was on the line.
Freedom is inextricably tied to a sense of individuality and empowerment. This pandemic has taught us that this ideology in certain circumstances can literally be toxic and deadly. Our individual, discrete actions create ripples – good and bad – that can affect many, many other people. These others can include our elders, those younger than us, those we are close to and dear to our hearts, and countless more people we will never meet.
This interconnectedness of society is intensified during global crises like a pandemic. From going outside to staying home, our actions have real consequences. However mundane such actions may seem, they are influenced by the past, done in the present, and create ripples into the future. Dark, one of the best series I’ve ever watched on Netflix, posits an interesting scenario: what happens if present actions directly influence the past as well? And what if events that happen in the future change the past?
Maybe I sound extra crazy, or those are just the kind of WTF questions Dark makes me think of. I literally woke up in the middle of the night because I had a dream a future version of me was staring at me sleeping. Obviously, a deadly combination of quarantine and this show have broke my brain. But I mean that in the best way possible – I thought everything about this show was superb. From the acting and story to the set and music, every aspect pieced together to create a beautifully tragic mosaic.
As dark (ha) secrets about the characters are unveiled, the audience hauntingly realizes how much is connected. Every person, in every time period, is doomed to repeat history and play a direct role in different timelines. Past, present and future are happening simultaneously and shaping each other in the process. No meme describes this phenomenon better than this one by reddit user u/arjun_aditya:
So yeah, imagine waking up one night and seeing that future you is staring at present you sleeping. Pretty fucked up right? Time travel is obviously not a new concept in sci fi (see Back to the Future, Black Science, Dark Matter, La Jetée just to name a few), but I think Dark does it very beautifully in its own unique way. How so you might ask?
It’s so German. It’s the most German thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t consume that much German content so maybe that’s why. But I really learned a lot about German culture watching this show.
The circumstances and consequences of time travel are very tragic, but in a really beautiful, dark way. I don’t know, am I just a masochist when it comes to feelings? It’s revealed so thoughtfully and paced really well.
The villain is so good because you never know who the actual villain is. Is it Adam? Claudia? Or is it TIME???? Omg, it’s totally time. WHO THE FUCK WINS? What would winning even look like? The inexistence of time as a concept? It is a human intervention after all. But what kind of world would that even look like?
Dark made me realize that past, present, and future really are happening at the same time. Think about it: the present is influenced by the past and creates the future. (PRESENT = PAST = FUTURE) Elders carry a piece of the past that we never lived through and those younger than us are going to become the future / see a future we never will (probably?). Inside us all, we have our experiences of the past, our hopes for the future, and live in the now. And what we do shapes it all.
Time, space, everyone, everything, is so delicately connected. And even though we’re all cooped up in our homes, as physically isolated as possible from any other human being, this rings true more loudly than ever. In the time of covid-19, the everyday choices we make can mean literal life or death for people we may never meet, or those that we are close to.
So, it really makes you wonder: what actions am I going to take during this pandemic? What do I want to see happen in the future, and what will the past remember me as? Unlike Louise Banks from Story of Your Life, we haven’t learned an alien language that will give us knowledge of the guaranteed future. Thankfully, this means that we are not trapped into a set future. These uncertain times present us with a unique opportunity to exercise free will in actively creating the future we want to see. And right now, all data about covid-19 leads to 2 paths: really terribly bad, or somewhat OK. Where do you want it to go, and how are your actions going to get us all there?