The Problem with How Long

The questions grief produces are almost all time questions. How long ago did it happen? How long has it been since I heard his voice? How long before I see her again? How long does the intermediate state last? Is he aware of time passing? Does it feel, from inside wherever he is, like a long wait?

These questions assume that time is a container — a fixed external framework in which events occur and durations are measured. The container exists independently of the things inside it. You can ask how long something has been inside the container because the container itself is ticking along regardless.

This assumption is so embedded in ordinary human experience that most people have never noticed they are making it. You wake up in the morning and time has been passing while you slept. You step outside and the world has been doing things in your absence. The container was running. You were just not in it consciously for a while.

But the assumption is not as solid as it feels. And the place where it begins to come apart is exactly the place this chapter needs to go.

Augustine and the Distension of the Soul

Augustine of Hippo, writing his Confessions around AD 397, devotes the entire eleventh book to the question of time. He begins with what sounds like a simple question and turns it into one of the most profound analyses in the history of philosophy: what is time?

His conclusion is not what most people expect. Time, Augustine argues, is not an external container. Time is a property of the soul. Specifically, it is what he calls the distension of the soul — the stretching of consciousness across the tension between memory and expectation. The past does not exist as past. It exists as the soul's present memory of past things. The future does not exist as future. It exists as the soul's present expectation of future things. Only the present actually is — and the present is itself almost nothing, a knife-edge between a past that is no longer and a future that is not yet.

What we experience as time is the soul's mode of apprehending its own existence across this tension. When we say something lasted a long time, we are describing a property of our experience, not a measurement of an external container. When we say we remember something from long ago, we are describing the present state of our own consciousness as it holds that memory, not our position on an external timeline.

God, Augustine says, is not in this tension. God does not have a past that was and a future that is not yet. God is the eternal present — not an infinitely long time but the absence of the sequential structure that makes time what it is for finite souls. When Augustine asks God in that book, "What were you doing before you made heaven and earth?" he answers his own question by saying the question itself is malformed. There was no before before creation, because before is a time-word, and time is a property of the created soul. God did not wait before creating. God created, and with creation came time.

This is not mystical hand-waving. It is a rigorous analysis of the structure of consciousness. And it has a direct implication for the question of the intermediate state: if time is the distension of the soul rather than an external container, then what the soul experiences outside the body — outside the conditions that generate the sequential structure of finite time — is not more of the same time, running on in the soul's absence. It is a different mode of existence altogether.