Tempo Curvo a Krems: Time as a Way of Seeing
I am not well-versed in physics—barely even familiar with it. But since Claudio Magris referenced special relativity in his book, I attempted to explain it as best I could, though clumsily.
According to special relativity, events are classified into three categories based on their spacetime interval: timelike, lightlike, and spacelike events. The first two are connected by signals traveling at or below the speed of light, meaning there is a causal relationship between them—cause precedes effect, and one event gives rise to another. However, spacelike events are too far apart for even light to bridge them in time; no signal can connect them fast enough, meaning they share no causality. As a result, there is no absolute order of spacelike events—the sequence in which they occur depends on the observer’s frame of reference. No matter which comes first, A and B will never be each other’s past or future. A linear perception of time does not apply to events without causality.
That night in Krems, after his lecture, Magris unexpectedly learned from a lady that his high school crush, Nori S., had once secretly admired him as well. Since he wasn’t even sure Nori had known of his existence, he didn’t believe it at first. But soon after, in Rome, he ran into an old classmate who confirmed that it was indeed true. He dialed Nori’s number, and as they spoke, their conversation felt warm and familiar, as if they had been close friends for years.
"So, was my conversation with Nori’s cousin in Linz the cause, or the result?"
When a past he had never been aware of intruded upon his present, his memories of high school were not merely recalled, but reconstructed. For Nori, her hidden admiration in high school had led to the phone call sixty years later, while from Magris’s perspective, it was the phone call that had rewritten a chapter of his youth. Like two observers—one standing on Earth, the other aboard a fast-moving spaceship—watching the same sequence of events unfold, each sees a different order and weaves a different narrative of cause and effect. But which came first? Who led to whom? One can never tell.
Or perhaps, like spacelike events in special relativity, Nori’s long-buried secret and Magris’s accidental conversation in Rome had stepped beyond the constraints of linear time, escaping the causal framework altogether.
These two events spanned more than sixty years, yet the weight of time collapsed in the instant the call was made—suddenly, they existed only as a memory of the present. Perhaps we ought to reform grammar itself, abolishing all tenses except the present. When the person in your memory once again walks through the hallway in high school, it is neither the past nor the future—it is simply a Parmenidean present, an all-encompassing vastness, stripped of causality.
How could one possibly dissect each moment, tracing its causes and predicting its consequences?
I picture the cinema Magris describes, the one on Via Giulia in Trieste, where two adjacent screens play the same film, and the audience is free to move between them. Entering from one door, you see a version of the story where the protagonist has already died; stepping into the other, you see him still fighting, still in love. I can choose which screen to watch, but no matter where I sit, I cannot ignore the flickering images at the edges of my vision. Each is both the cause and the result of the other, eternally coexisting in the present.
Life unfolds along the straight path of time. Each day, I grow older, yet in every fleeting instant, I feel time bending around me.
I stand within the sphere of time, pushing it steadily forward. Yet, in a daze, I seem to find myself back at the beginning