8 perspectives on time, as seen from spain
I spent much of my trip to Spain thinking about times that were not the present.
I do not think I am particularly good at being in the present. My thoughts tend to outpace the progression of the seconds, spiraling far into the future and untethering me from the current moment. The world stretches beyond my temporal perception in ways I will never predict and my only defense is to try and predict it all the time. There is always so much more to consider than what is right in front of me.
My therapist says this is called “anxiety.” I tell her I didn’t know we had a specific name for time-travelers.
I spent a week in Spain. It is a beautiful country, caught (like most things) between a past and a future. In fact, the vast majority of it exists in the past or future: billions of years of history, unknown trillions of future destinies. Only a minuscule fraction of a fraction is truly here and now, a fraction so tiny that it may as well not exist. So, I think it makes sense that I didn’t spend much time in the present.
My aunt took me on hikes, told me stories on the way there, the way up. She knows a lot about the history of this land. She enjoys tracing the current moment backward in time: how did this abandoned village get here? Who built it, and who left it behind? We walk among its ruins, which seem much older than their real age: crumbled stones and decaying timbers blocking pathways, a dead calf rotting in what used to be a living room. The church’s ceiling is entirely missing, replaced with the endless vault of heaven. Somebody has left flowers and bones at its single grave.
We walk to the top of the hill, a clearing, a lonely house still cared-for. She tells me of when she lived in Russia, what she saw of the historic transition from communist rule to capitalism, the upending of these people’s entire social system, their lives changed forever. I only remember that she said Russians love to eat mushrooms. The door to the lonely house is locked.
We take another hike, another day, another mountain. This time, the structure at the top is far older. Prehistorically old. A dolmen, a precarious-looking structure made of three large stones. It seems as if it should have toppled a long time ago. But here it stands, three, five, seven thousand years after it was built. I put my hand on its wall, tracing the rough rock, trying to imagine what it has seen. This specific configuration of stone has lasted longer than empires, longer than cultures, perhaps longer than recorded human history itself. I am careful not to push too hard. I do not want to be its downfall.
The last hike my aunt took me on was near a railway station. Climbing the hill next to the rails, I see rows and rows of platforms spread out over the valley, the tangle of tracks stretching into the distance. The station is enormous. It is also dead. Grass and trees grow between the tracks, abandoned coaches rot on their sidings, the building roofs caved in years ago. A measly single line continues glowing bright and clean, still in use. Everything else is rusting into oblivion.
This station used to be a vital link from Spain to France; a sign tells us that half the station was in each country. The real border is a few kilometers away, but would have felt true to the trains and travelers passing through. French and Spanish trains use different, incompatible sizes of track. The countries’ sprawling networks met here, hundreds and thousands of lines converging on this single point—but the trains could never cross. An impossibly thin barrier separates these two lands. Passengers in the past would have had to transfer here, get out and walk the last few feet across the border, experience it as a physical thing. They were forced to stand in this in-between.
Today more than ever, it’s clear that the station rests on its barrier, that paper-thin division between endless spaces. Its past is far behind it, its platforms rotting into disuse, its sidings reclaimed by nature. But its future stretches far in front of it, promising new frontiers. The Spanish government wants to reestablish the rail link here, turn it into a true border crossing again. It’s possible that its two daily trains will expand into four, ten, thirty, a hundred. Staring down at the rusted tracks, I see them gleaming brand-new in the sun, decades in the past and decades in the future. This station is symmetrical in space and time, and I am standing exactly in the divide.
When I told people I was going to Barcelona, everyone said I had to see the church, La Sagrada Familia. Towering over the city, its curved towers and graceful arches are unlike any building I’ve ever seen. I squint up at it, trying to block the sun with my hand. Someone asks me if I want a photo. Only five euros, he says, showing me a bit of developing film, a family framed in front of the church. They have been flattened, trapped, confined to this piece of paper, this specific moment of time. I think I would scream.
He moves on to another family and I watch them accept their fate, coo at their frozen selves caught in the camera’s film. Is a photo not an act of violence, another person deciding how to present you forever? I look up at the church again. Higher than its tallest spire is the ugly yellow crane. The church is still under construction after nearly a hundred and fifty years. It is planned to take many more. I think back to a painting I saw in a tourist shop: La Sagrada Familia, the crane next to it like a protective parent. The artist chose to include the crane, to hold the church in its state of transition, to keep it unfinished, in flux, forever-changing. It is split between the past and future, where it has been and where it will go. It will never be done. I would give anything to trust that state in myself, to feel reassured that it will never end, that the changes will always be toward something greater. I resolve to return and buy the print.
I suppose I was thinking about time so much while I was in Spain because it was my twenty-first birthday. This is an important birthday for a lot of people. (Well, probably mostly Americans. I don’t drink, so I didn’t care.) I tried to downplay it, as I’ve tried to downplay my last decade of birthdays. Some friends texted me, I called my parents. The few hours I forgot it was my birthday were some of the best hours of my day, free of all the expectations that date brings with it. My therapist asks me why I don’t like my birthday. How do I explain to her that that day, of all days, is the hardest to live in the present of? The past year drags on me like a dead weight, the coming one is so intimidating I can hardly look at it. I have never accomplished what I wanted to, already know that I will fail the next year in the same way. I’d rather forget that this day is any division at all. I wish it wasn’t special.
It wouldn’t be, if I wasn’t so stuck outside of the present.
My last day in Spain, I went to a contemporary art museum. Their website warned me that skateboarders can usually be found practicing outside on the steps. I was not prepared for how many there would be: over thirty of them, young and old, dressed in every kind of clothing, filling the concrete plaza in front of the museum with the constant rumble of wheels and clack of skateboards landing. The stones themselves were worn away by the boards, the sharp-cut corner of a low barrier rounded out by hundreds and hundreds of skateboarders grinding on it. For every trick someone landed, four other people failed theirs. This wasn’t a performance; it was truly practice. I sat next to another family and watched for a long time. One skateboarder attempted a trick again and again and again, caught in a constant loop. When he finally landed it, the whole crowd cheered. We were freed. I got up and entered the museum.
Inside the museum, there was a piece on the sound of space. For two years, a microphone on the plaza outside had recorded a random minute of audio every hour. I sat and clicked on a random date, about a year ago, and heard the whole day unfurl within my ears. Chatter at midnight, silence in the early morning, birds and people walking as the sun rose. The skateboarders came at nine am, the sounds exactly what I had just been hearing outside. The noise rose and fell, changing subtly throughout the day. The skateboarding noise finally died down around ten pm, replaced with quieter talking, laughing, only to fade into silence as the early morning came again.
I selected a different day. The skateboarders came at the same time. Their exclamations and laugher were different, but the sound of their boards was identical. Clack, crash, krrrrr. Another day, a different year, the same sound. Different day, same sound. Different day, same sound. The scene I had just watched outside played here every day, the specific actors and beats changing, but the fundamental actions identical. It was a cycle, repeating as far back in time as the microphone had existed. It may as well have been repeating forever.
It was here, listening to these audio recordings, that I finally felt still. Rather than thinking back to the past or forward to the future, rather than futilely trying to peel my eyes and live in the present, all the pressure was gone. Time instead blended into one long gradient. The days repeated, again and again, the rhythm of the city a gentle rise and fall as natural as breathing. There was no present to exist within because the present stretched infinitely forward and backward, the skateboarders and early risers and midnight laughter always there. There were no more instants, no more barriers between past and future, no more last or next year. Just the skateboarders, arriving, practicing, laughing, falling, dispersing. Again and again and again.
“Excuse me,” a museum worker tapped me on the shoulder. “We are closing. It’s time to leave.”
I thought about watching the skateboarders again as I left, but I had already seen everything they would do.
The only time I felt truly present was on the train. For the first few kilometers, the high-speed route I took traced the Mediterranean. But not closely. It didn’t hug the coastline, revel in showing me the water’s edge. Rather, the sea was obscured behind mountains, towns, the turn and twist of the train itself. Face pressed against the window, trying to catch glimpses of the sea, I felt like I was breathing with the land. The hills rose and fell with my own chest. I would see nothing but grass and mountains, the occasional bright red and white town, then, suddenly, like a flash—water, a great blue expanse caught between the slopes of two mountains, the sun glittering against its horizon, the picture as perfect as a postcard, and then, just as suddenly—gone forever. My camera was useless at this speed, the views appearing and vanishing in the blink of an eye, the only way to capture them to see them and fix them in my mind. To keep the world from speeding by unnoticed, I had no choice but to be there.
The train (I think to myself as we speed along, the mountains slowly crawling across the landscape in the distance, the sea far behind us now), the train gives us a strictly temporal experience of space. It speeds by the landscape, never stopping, never slowing. Things that have been here for millions of years—the mountains, the sea, the horizon—are glimpsed through the trees, the train flashing past them in the space of a breath. Alignments of objects are brought into focus and lost again, repeated with each passing train car, each pair of eager eyes trained on the landscape. You cannot decide to make a moment last longer. Everything passes in the same infinitesimal instant, and the scene only exists for as long as it takes the train to create and destroy it. The mountain is as temporary as a bird next to these unwavering iron rails.
I’ve often heard that the fourth dimension is time, but have been unable to really imagine it. How can you see in a dimension you barely exist in? The train, perhaps, gives me a possibility. I am experiencing the world as a series of flashing images, a fragmented picture of a much greater whole. But the world is all out there; the houses and hills continue to exist when I do not see them, the angles and framings of the scenery are all there to discover, reachable by methods other than a train. I may have felt some of that at the museum. The audio recordings gave me a better vantage point, the ability to retrace my steps and see more of the land at once, disembark from the speeding train to take a gentle walk. I could stop, turn, sit, admire the views. I could see every angle of a mountain at once, be content in the idea that if I lost some part of it, it would always circle back. Time washed over me like a gentle sea, barriers and divisions, futures and pasts all blended into a single presence, one infinitely long moment.
But you cannot cross a country at a slow walk. You do not live long enough to see every angle of every mountain. Here, I only get flashes. That single glimpse of the sea between the mountains is all I will ever see. The train moves inexorably forward. Pay attention, or the world will pass you by.