Matthew T Grant

It does.

Everyone says, “Time is money.” But isn’t it more true that space is money?

I can’t increase the amount of time I have. In fact, I can’t possess time in any real sense because, in a very real sense, time doesn’t exist.

Time is not; it’s more like the is-ing or is-ness of everything. (I think a Nazi philosopher once wrote about this.)

By contrast, I can increase the amount of space (actual, physical space) that I own and control. In fact, through rents and the extraction of natural resources, this space can be fairly easily converted into money.

The notion that “time is money” is the expression of a wish: the wish for immortality. If time were something that we could accumulate and hoard, then we could, through force of will, stave off death, the end of our specific time.

But time doesn’t work that way.

Nor does money.

In the face of a traumatic event (especially one called “incomprehensible”), we either run to the facts—what happened? why did it happen? what were the causes for this effect?—covering up our feelings, our shock, our horror, our sorrow with the details, or the restless search for them.

Or we run to the future, focusing on how we’ll get through this, how we will prevent this from happening again, and how “we won’t let this define us.”

Or, oddly enough, we run towards the event itself, immersing ourselves in it, agonizing over it. But in so doing, we either ignore or forget or neglect what is actually facing us in our own specific lives. Unless you were directly affected, focusing on this is, in its own way, a kind of self-indulgence. In the name of “facing reality,” a turning away.

Thus does madness become a mirror of madness.

A few months back at the playground with my children, we found a hatchling that had been knocked out of its nest by a thunderstorm. It was lying on the ground, half covered with ants, but twitching because it was still alive.

Walking around the neighborhood the other day, we found spots where a skunk or raccoon had dug up and eaten a bunch of turtle’s eggs.

I found a dead fisher cat by the side of the road. I told a friend about it and she said, “We had a raccoon’s nest in a tree in our backyard and one night the raccoons were screaming and freaking out because a fisher cat had climbed into the nest and was eating their babies.”

When some look at the so-called “natural” world, they see marvelous, even miraculous, complexity. Others see the hand of a loving and just creator. I see a combination of indifference, brutality, and madness. The sun and blue sky look down on your family vacation just as they did the Killing Fields.

Whenever someone invokes the “natural” as something inherently positive and good, I remind them that there is no moral value inherent in any aspect of the physical universe.

I’m also quick to acknowledge that imposing or imputing moral value to actions, events, and objects in the physical universe, as humans are so inclined to do, is perfectly natural.

Image Courtesy of DG Jones.