autumn, a photo by antje b. on Flickr.

… is the title of the book by Swiss author Martin Suter that deliciously fills my spare moments. Even if they don’t really exist, those moments, as according to one of the main protagonists, there is no time. Rather, he says, we have all fallen prey to the illusion that change is not just observable fact. Instead, to help us place and keep track of a multitude of changes, we have come up with another dimension.

But just because time makes sense of change to our feeble linear minds doesn’t mean it really exists. For one, you can’t see it. Measuring it, the elderly man argues, is rather unscientific. Watch the second hand on a clock move, and you miss a supposedly infinite number of supposed milliseconds, and all you see for it is one change: the second hand moving on one step. Hence it’s the change that is real, not time.

I enjoy how the book challenges my perception of something I have come to accept as a given. I’m not convinced by the theory (I’m not finished with the book yet) but it feels good to rethink things I last wondered about at an age (a time?) when I questioned everything in order to find myself. Too long ago.

I like how changing your idea about time (or any other given) can help you change your entire life, whether how you are going about it is particularly clever or not, as the other main protagonist is in the process of proving (again, I’m not through yet). But after all, if time doesn’t exist, there is no need to worry about the consequences of anything, right?

;-)