Chapter 5
John Ciardi and Phiilippa Pearce: Clocks
The next story I want to discuss is a poem. It’s from a wonderful collection of poems by John Ciardi called
Grandfather Clock
I know someone who is so slow
It takes him all day and all night to go
From Sunday to Monday, and all week long
To get back to Sunday. He never goes wrong.
And he never stops. But oh, my dear
From birthday to birthday it takes him all year!
And that’s much too slow, as I know you know.
One day I tried to tell him so.
But all he would say was “tick” and “tock.”
— Poor old slow grandfather clock.i
Among philosophical topics that the writers of children’s literature commonly deal with, time is certainly a favorite. Doubtless the most popular way of dealing with time is to provoke reflections on time travel. Thus, to choose a rather simple example, in Ivor Cutler’s story, Meal One (New York, 1971), the mother, when she wants to get rid of a horrible, unnaturally fast-growing tree that is destroying the house, reaches for the hand of the clock and moves time back an hour. One’s five-year-old child grins and murmurs, “You can’t do that.” The child’s grin and murmur acknowledge what philosophers of time, in their grandiloquent way, call the “anisotropy of time” – the irreversibility of time’s arrow.
But, of course, you can do that, in fact, we often have to do that so as to be able to tell the correct time. In flying out here to Hobart from my home in Massachusetts I had the choice of moving my watch back 8 (9) hours, or moving it up 16 (15) hours.
The perplexities John Ciardi’s poem invite us to reflect on, however, are even more basic than time travel. What Ciardi is having fun with is the fundamental idea that time passes. What could be a more basic feature of time than the obvious fact that time passes? Of course, some philosophers and scientists think we should conceive of time as a dimension of reality quite like the three dimensions of space, indeed, as a fourth dimension of physical reality. But if time really is a dimension, like one of the spatial dimensions. then it doesn’t actually pass, despite what the many “passage” idioms of language suggest. You must have here in Australia some version of the story about the city slicker who asks the country bumpkin, “Where does this road go?” to which he gets the reply, “It don’t go nowhere; it just stays right here.”
If time really does pass, then it must move at some rate or other. But at what rate then does it move? The only answer possible seems to this: a minute a minute, an hour an hour, a day a day, a year a year. Some philosophers think this answer so ridiculous as to show, all by itself, that time doesn’t really pass at all. One defender of the view that it doesn’t really pass at all, D.C. Williams, who was a teacher of mine, wrote a famous article called “The Myth of Passage.”ii
Other philosophers think the answer, ‘a minute a minute, an hour an hour, etc.’ expresses a truism. We object to it, they maintain, because its truth is so obvious. Understandably, but mistakenly, we reject the answer as too simple.
John Ciardi’s poem manages to suggest both responses at once. The child’s impatience with Grandfather Clock is a playful device for expressing impatience with the passage of time. The child wants to speed life up. (“. . . that’s much too slow, as I know you know.”) The clock’s response mocks the child’s impatience. His slow “tick” and “tock” teach patience. After all, it really does take “all week long to get back to Sunday.” But then again, maybe time couldn’t be speeded up because it is only in a manner of speaking that time moves at all! The idea that speeding time up is an incoherent notion may be suggested in the poem by the fact that the clock responds – not in words – but with its interminable “tick” and “tock.”
So here are several ‘How can it be that p?’ questions. ‘How can it be that time sometimes passes quickly?’ ‘How can it be that time sometimes passes slowly?’ But perhaps the most basic question is ‘How can it be that time passes at all?’ After all, to pass is to move from being, say, to the left of point a at time t to being to the right of a at some later time t*. But how could time itself make any such movement in time?
Space is puzzling. Does it go on forever? How could it? But if it stops somewhere, what could bring it to an end? If it curves back on itself, why couldn’t there be something outside it? And what could it possibly be to be outside, not just this space or that space, but outside all space?
If space is mysterious, and it is, time is even more mysterious. John Ciardi’s poem brings out some of the many puzzles time poses. You might think that children don’t naturally think about the pluzzles of time. But, if you did, you would be wrong. It is very easy to initiate a philosophically interesting discussion of time with children.
I often make up my own children’s stories to start up a philosophical discussion with children in school. Sometimes I make up a story that presents a line of reasoning to be found in some classical text. I did that recently to start up a discussion with schoolchildren on the subject of time. I actually had a passage from Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions in mind when I wrote the story, but since that passage is much longer than the version in Aristotle, I’ll just read Aristotle’s version, which is the most succinct version of the puzzle I know. “That time time does not exist at all . . . “ Aristotle writes at the beginning of Chapter 10 of Book IV of his Physics,
might be suspected from the following consideration. Some of it [that is, some of time] has been and is not, [whereas] some of it is to be and is not yet. But it would seem to be impossible that what is composed of things that don’t exist should participate in being. (217b32-18a3)
The Augustine passage, in Book XI of his Confessions, relies on the same reasoning, but adds a puzzle about the disappearing present, and, in general, makes the puzzle much more dramatic.
I composed a story based on these texts for a demonstration class last November in Oslo. Norway. Here is the story I came up with:
Time
Mother: Hi, Tor, how was school today?
Tor (throwing down his school pack and beginning to take off his jacket): Oh, all right, I
guess. But we have this girl in my science class who thinks she knows everything.
She was in Switzerland last year. I think her father is a big scientist or something. He
was working in a lab there. Her name is Ingrid. Do you know what she said today?
Mother: I don’t have a very good way to guess from what you’ve told me so far.
Tor: Well, the teacher, Mr. Knudsen, was saying something about space and time and this
Ingrid, she raised her hand and said in this sickly-sweet know-it-all voice of hers,
“You know, Mr.Knudsen, there really is no such thing as time.”
Mother: What did Mr. Knudsen say to that?
Tor: Well, you know how he always likes to humor students, especially the smart ones,
so he just smiled and said, “What makes you say that, Ingrid?”
Mother: Did Ingrid have a good reply?
Tor: Well, she started off by saying, “You know, Mr. Knudsen, if there really were such
things as times, some of them would be long and others would be short.”
Mother: Did Mr. Knudsen agree to that?
Tor: Of course. But then this Ingrid said in her sassy way – I can’t stand her – “But you
know, Mr. Knudsen, the past doesn’t exist anymore. So there is nothing of the past
to be either long or short. And the future doesn’t exist yet. So the future isn’t there
to be long or short either.”
Mother: That sounds pretty interesting. Did Mr. Knudsen have a good reply?
Tor: Well, he said, “What about the present, Ingrid? That exists, doesn’t it?” And you
know what Ingrid said to that?
Mother: No, son, tell me.
Tor: Well she said, “You might think a whole day, or a whole hour, or at least a whole
minute could be present. But really,” she went on, “even though it’s now, say,
Thursday, some of Thursday is already past and some is future. So some of it
doesn’t exist any more and the rest doesn’t exist yet.”
Mother: What did Ingrid say about the present minute? Surely none of the present minute
is already past or still future.
Tor: Oh yeah, she had an answer for that, too, She said, “So and so many seconds are
already past and the rest are future. All that is really present is something like a
knife-edge of time. That’s not either long or short. It’s just a knife-edge. So,” she
concluded, “since, if there were such a thing as time, there would have to be long
times and short times, and no such things ever exist, there is no such thing as time.”
Mother: I can tell Ingrid is very smart. Did Mr. Knudsen have a good answer for her?
Tor: Well, he said we were all to go home and think about what Ingrid had said.
Tomorrow we are each suppose to come up with the best response we can. I wish I
could think of something that would blow her out of the water. She thinks she’s so
smart.
Mother: Well, you could go over and talk to Olaf’s big sister. I think she has done a little
philosophy at the University.
Tor: No, I want to figure this out for myself. I want to show that Ingrid isn’t really the
smartest kid in the class. She just thinks she is.
* * *
I had set things up in Norway so that there would be a Norwegian translation of this story for the dozen fifth-graders in the demonstration class there. We planned to use a modified version of the Community of Inquiry Method. Each child’s comment was to be written on the board, first in Norwegian, and then, for my benefit, in English. After we had enough comments on the board, we would then discuss them.
The kids were very appealing. And they certainly had plenty of ideas about time. But the bilingual procedure turned out to be very cumbersome. We ended up discussing the reality of time, not with respect to Ingrid’s argument (that is the argument I had taken from Aristotle, Sextus, and Augustine) but rather with respect to a claim one of the kids made, very much in the spirit of Augustine, as well as that of a comment Aristotle makes several chapters later, that there wouldn’t be time if there weren’t minds to measure it. That led us into a consideration of whether non-human animals have a sense of time, and how they might show that they do, as well as a consideration of whether there was time before there were any human beings.
Thus, although the discussion in Norway was certainly very interesting and worthwhile, I can’t say that it was really a discussion of the issues raised directly by the story I had made up. The main reason, I think, it veered off in the way that it did, was that we were working in two different languages before a large audience and the children seemed not to have understood the original story in the way I had intended.
Fortunately, however, for purposes of our session today, I had tried the story out on a class of fifth-graders in Northampton, Massachusetts before I left for Norway.And there we didn’t have the language problems we had in Norway. What follows now, is a description of the Noarthampton class.
The discussion began in a rather uncertain way. Sydney, let’s call him, commented that “Ingrid was using philosophy.” That was actually a rather promising starting point. I wrote it on the poster board for later discussion.
Three of the next four comments, however, focused on the psychological dynamics of the story. Thus Julie (all the names are altered) pointed out, what is surely correct, that “Tor wants to have a response to show that Ingrid wasn’t right.” May added that “Tor is jealous of Ingrid,” which is highly plausible. And Anthony expressed the very reasonable thought that “The continuation of the story should show that Ingrid isn’t as smart as she thinks she is.”
In the midst of these comments, Kristine raised her hand and, with a frown on her face, blurted out, “I don’t get it.” Since I was, at that point, following the Community-of-Inquiry Methodology, I responded by writing on the board, “I don’t get it,” with her name afterward. Several kids giggled and Kristine blushed a bit as I wrote her exasperated comment down, but I tried to reassure her that that was a really good thing to say and that we would try to deal with it once we had all the initial comments on the board.
So far there had been two good goads to further discussion, Sydney’s “Ingrid was using philosophy” and Kristine’s “I don’t get it.” The other comments had more to do with what is called “reading comprehension.” Still, I wasn’t completely disappointed, since I had myself built the element of jealousy into the story to help motivate the search for a good reply to a what is, after all, a rather abstract, even abstruse, bit of philosophical reasoning. It was good to be assured that the kids had understood the psychological dynamics of the story.
There is a more general issue here. I write story beginnings like this one and ask the kids how the story should go on to try to present philosophical problems as problems they themselves can have. In this case the question is what Tor should say in response to Ingrid. It is important to the enterprise I want to foster that the kids don’t say at the end, “Now tell us what the answer is.” And, in fact, they never do that. They soon take these problems on as their own. They may or may not be able to handle them to their own satisfaction. But the aim is, if possible, for them to take ownership of the problems. The aim is most definitely not to get them to learn some famous solution to the problem under discussion. It is not even to get them to recapitulate the history of philosophy, though that is often what they do. It is rather to help them become self-reliant thinkers who have the ability to address difficult and fascinating philosophical issues and work out articulate and well-argued responses.
But I am jumping ahead of my story. The first five comments did not actually tackle the philosophical issue the story raises. At this point I wondered if I had made a mistake in bringing such a difficult bit of reasoning to these fifth-graders. As I have already mentioned, the argument I had incorporated in the story is found in its most famous form in St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI. I might add that the solution Augustine offers is not one that very many people find satisfactory. Something quite like it appears much earlier in Book IV of Aristotle’s Physics. Uncharacteristically, Aristotle seems to offer no solution to the problem at all, either in the Physics or elsewhere in his writings. So why should I expect a group of fifth-graders with no previous training in philosophy to be able to figure out an interesting response to a problem Aristotle apparently was not able to solve and Augustine responded to only in a fashion many people find disappointing?
Well, naïve or not, my faith was rewarded. Orson screwed up his face, twisted his body a bit and raised his hand. “If the past doesn’t exist,” he said carefully, weighing each word, “I couldn’t have started this sentence, since I wouldn’t have existed then.” My heart jumped with excitement. While the others were talking, Orson had clearly been working away in his own mind at a response to Ingrid’s argument. And his response was an excellent one. Other kids immediately jumped on it and expanded it. Jason said, “If the past didn’t exist, nothing would exist now.”
Orson’s idea, in its full generality, is this: If the past doesn’t exist, then there is nothing that could have brought anything that now exists into being – this sentence I am writing, the people who are now talking about this philosophical question, the world around us, anything at all that now exists.! I don’t recall running across an attempt to establish the reality of the past exactly that way anywhere in the history of philosophy. It was a stunning move.
In the discussion that followed, several kids tried to think about the specific kind of reality that the past has. Jason was particularly persistent in this effort. “The past sort of exists,” he said at one point, “because we experience it.” He didn’t exactly seem to have Augustine’s idea that the past exists in our memory. His idea seemed to be that the past exists in a way that makes it possible for us to know things about it.
Later on, Jason wanted to say more about the “sort of” existence that the past has. His idea at this point seemed to be that the past is settled, determinate, always one way or the other. It couldn’t have the definite character it has, he seemed to be saying, if it didn’t exist at all. His notion that the past is one way or another and we can’t change it echoes the traditional notion, to be found in Aristotle, that the past has a kind of necessity; it is the necessity of the unchangeable.
Talk about whether the past could be changed introduced the issue of time travel. Several kids had ideas about time travel, and whether, if you went back in time, you could actually change something that had happened, rather than simply being an ineffectual observer.
Talk about the kind of existence the past has also introduced a question about the kind of existence the future has. Several kids seemed prepared to accept Ingrid’s claim in the story, that the future simply has no existence at all. But some seemed to want to assign it some existence as well. A summary way of putting their point would be this: The future sort of exists, too, because the same thing that is now present, was future.
I should also mention that Kristine, the child who first blurted out, “I don’t get it,” came to take an animated part in the discussion. It seems to have been important to the discussion as it developed that she had been fearless enough to say at the beginning that she didn’t get it. But eventually she certainly did get it and she made an important contribution to the class response.
Early on we returned to Sydney’s comment that Ingrid was using philosophy. I asked the kids how they knew that. Someone who had paid close attention to the story pointed out that the Mother in the story had suggested that Tor go over to someone who had studied philosophy at the University to get his problem solved. That observation was certainly a textually astute comment.
I think it was Sydney who picked up on his own comment and explained rather impressively that what Ingrid was doing was philosophy because it was giving reasons for something, not just making a blanket statement. There were then two or three rather eloquent comments from him about how it wasn’t enough just to have an opinion about something; one needs to be able to give reasons.
One of the last comments was very simple, yet, in its own way, also very profound. A kid who had not participated much in the discussion, let’s call him Robert, said, eyeing the clock, “There’s a time when school gets out; so time exists.” Robert was making a point very much like one the English philosopher, G.E. Moore, was famous for, earlier in this century. J.M.E. McTaggart, like Ingrid, had argued that time is unreal. Moore replied that he knew he had had breakfast that morning, so time must exist. Moore went on to say that he was much more certain that he had had breakfast that morning than he could possibly be that McTaggart’s rather complicated argument for the unreality of time is a sound argument, that is, a completely valid argument with true premises.
The discussion of the kind of reality that the past has, both among the children in that Northampton class and in the Oslo demonstration group, leads directly into the final story I want to discuss in this chapter.
* * *
John Wisdom, a philosopher who taught at Cambridge University in the middle years of the 20th Century, tried to help us see that philosophy can sometimes help us think about whether some attitude we have is, as he put it, “well placed.”iii Thus a philosopher may ask whether an attitude towards the universe as something ensouled, or guarded, or created, is a well-placed attitude. Again, a philosopher may consider whether it might be appropriate to think of a person one hasn’t seen for many years as a descendent of the earlier person one knew, perhaps only as a child.
Tom’s Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce (Dell, 1979), deals with our attitudes toward time, mutability, and people much older, or much younger, than we are. It invites us to consider whether the attitudes we have toward time, change, and age are well placed.
In the story Tom is sent to stay with an uncle and aunt while his brother recovers from the measles. In exile Tom learns, accidentally, that he can escape the tedium of his surroundings by slipping out at midnight into a Victorian garden. In the garden he can enjoy playing with a little girl named “Hatty.”
The world of the midnight garden is peculiar in several ways. In it Tom is invisible to many people around him, though not, fortunately, to Hatty. Then there are peculiarities about the time of that world. From the perspective of ourworld, things that take place in that world take no time at all. Moreover, Tom finds on successive visits to that world that, although sometimes Hatty is actually younger than she was on his previous visit, mostly she gets much older each time around.
At the end of the story Tom meets Mrs. Bartholomew, the reclusive landlady who lives in the flat at the top of the house and discovers that she, in fact, is the hatty with whom he has played each night of his stay. With this revelation the reader is likely to feel a chill of excitement.
At the structural base of this sensitive and engaging story lies an asteismus, that is, a deliberate literalization of a common use of figurative language. The author has taken the cliché, ‘she lives in the past,’ and given it as nearly literal an interpretation as possible. The idea is that Mrs. Bartholomew spends much of her time, especially at night, and especially in her dreams, reliving her childhood. She does this in such a way that Tom is able to stumble on the world of Mrs. Bartholomew’s childhood and to play with her, in her past.
In part, Tom’s Midnight Garden is an exploration of the reality of time. In part, it is an effort to get us to look for the little girl in the old woman, as well as the grown-up in the little girl. We tend to see ourselves and others as though we and they were essentially young, or essentially middle-aged, or essentially old – as if Grandma had gone through life as an 82-year-old. But suppose that we, like Tom, could visit Grandma’s childhood. What attitudes might we have to her then? We might come to think of the relations our life histories bear to those of others about as as accidents of birth; we might be encouraged to explore the possibilities of friendship and companionship across vast differences of age.
To some extent, many of us do this anyway with our grandparents, or our grandchildren. The relationship between grandchildren in our society is often freed from the rigid role-playing that tends to govern the relationships between parents and their children. A grandparent may be free to be a sort of “pal” or booster or confidant in a way that may seem more inappropriate for a parent.
In the final scene of Tom’s Midnight Garden Tom and Mrs. Bartholomew say their goodbyes to each other with a certain stiff politeness. Tom descends the stairs slowly. Then, impulsively, he turns and bounds back up the stairs, two steps at a time. As his aunt later described the scene, “they hugged each other as if they had known each other for years and years, instead of only having met for the first time this morning.” She added: “There was something else, too, . . . although I know you’ll say it sounds even more absurd . . . Of course, Mrs. Bartholomew’s such a shrunken little old woman, she’s hardly bigger than Tom, anyway; but, you know, he put his arms right round her and he hugged her good-bye as if she were a little girl.”
This delightful story invites re-examination of the intergenerational attitudes expressed in our society. It encourages children to reflect on who the older people areound them really are and what the bounds of intergenerational relationships should be.
But there are philosophically more radical thoughts that this story inspires. I can introduce one by recalling an exchange between a colleague I had at the University of Minnesota, May Brodbeck, and a visitor to our department, Lewis White Beck. Beck was a rather aristocratic Southern gentleman, whereas Brodbeck was a Socialist with a working-class background, who, as a woman in the male-dominated world of academia, had had to fight for her place in society. Beck and Brodbeck were playing the game of considering what century they would choose to live in, if they had the choice. Beck, who was a great Kant scholar and an admirer of the Enlightenment, said, “Why the 18th Century, of course.” May screwed up her face and replied, skeptically, “That would be all right if one belonged to the upper class.” Beck smiled wryly and responded immediately, “Well, one would.”
We can certainly put ourselves imaginatively in other times and places. But could that really be me? Through cloning my DNA might be used to make my twin, many decades younger than I am. But that twin would not be me. I could have been been adopted by paupers or millionaires and have grown up in China or Argentina. But I could not, it seems, be me and have been born to any other parents or at any other time. Are then, the differences between me and children the ages of my grandchildren essential differences, or only accidents of circumstance.?