Proust, Wagner, and the spacetime of gardens
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010082
In Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s 1.5-million-word novel In Search of Lost Time, the narrator recalls the church in his hometown of Combray. After describing the church’s tapestries, crosses, and other treasures, the narrator muses that
all these things made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant.
At the end of act I of Richard Wagner’s 5.5-hour opera Parsifal, Gurnemanz, the oldest of the Grail knights, leads Parsifal, who’ll later become the youngest, from the forest and into the hall of Monsalvat Castle, telling him,
You see, my son, time changes here to space.
Should physicists be surprised that a writer and a composer should have appeared to grasp something like Albert Einstein’s notion of spacetime? I don’t think so. Of all the weirdnesses in Einstein’s special relativty—differentially aging twins, shrinking yardsticks, mass-increasing projectiles—spacetime seems the most natural and palatable.
When I first encountered spacetime, as a physics undergraduate at Imperial College London, I remember thinking that the presence of ct as the fourth coordinate alongside x, y, and z made clear, readily acceptable sense. In retrospect, I perhaps should have thought more deeply about the concept.
But you don’t have to be a giant of civilization like Proust (shown here), Wagner, and Einstein or an undergraduate physicist as I was to appreciate the dimensional kinship of space and time.
Yesterday I learned from my wife that a careful gardener sees her plot in four dimensions. She plants her flowers and vegetables based on where and when she wants them to appear.
