“I’ve done it all,” says Winston, “Mushrooms, MDMA, acid trips, DMT, ayahuasca both here and in Peru – you name it, I’ve done it.”

“And how do you feel after all those experiences?” asks Celestial Halo, his new-found spiritual friend at the gathering. It is the Full Moon in Aries camp-out. She is naked to the waist, with only a narrow silk sarong draped around her hips as they stand in the warm creek together.

Winston stumbles on his words, feeling like an idiot in front of this goddess-like creature.

“That I’m missing something. Like there’s more to life. I’ve meditated for months in the ashrams of India. I’ve spent weeks at Buddhist monasteries. Nothing seems to help anymore.”

“You might be ready for The Yield,” says Celestial Halo.

She removes her hip sarong with a single graceful movement.

“Would you mind looking after this for me?”

He can only stutter in reply.

“What’s the yield?” he calls, just before she sinks below the surface.

He watches her long hair lift and stream through the water. Tiny fish, no bigger than exclamation marks, hover alongside the curves of her flawless body.

She is submerged for what seems an age. As though holding its breath in sympathy, the surrounding forest falls silent. The sun trembles on the shimmering water. A kingfisher darts across the creek in a sudden flash of azure. The usual buzz of excited voices is absent from the adjacent camping area, another meditation workshop in progress.

Her head rises above the water and she takes in a deep slow breath.

“The Yield is when you release Time.”

“How do I do that?”

“You’ll know when it happens. You’ll be in a special place, a beautiful place.”

The Paris conference ends, leaving him a day free before his flight home. Winston approaches the valet who is stationed at his podium near the front of the hotel.

“I wish to drive out into the country, but not too far.”

“Ah yes, in that case perhaps I could suggest viewing the water lilies of Monet.”

“And where do I find these water lilies of Monet?”

“In Giverny, Monsieur. They are très bien.”

 He hires a little black Renault. After a surprisingly short drive of just over an hour, he arrives at the Fondation Monet.

“So we have two gardens, yes? Clos Normand, our beautiful flower garden in front of the house. And of course the very famous Le Jardin d’Eau, where Monsieur will find the water lily ponds and the little bridge. You will find this water garden on the other side of the road, yes?”

“Oui, parfait, merci,” says Winston.

A colour profusion surrounds the pink stucco house. The air is laced with the sweet scent of roses and the fecund earth is covered with daffodils, tulips, narcissus, iris, poppies and peonies. Feasting insects cloud around each aromatic flower head. Bees buzz-saw straight lines through the blue sky above him.

He sits on a wooden bench under the cherry trees and sighs with contentment. The last few lingering memories of the conference evaporate. The nagging worries about getting to Orly on time to catch his flight disappear. Even the anticipated pleasure of being back home in his apartment is displaced by the overpowering presence of the abundance around him. The last of his thoughts drains out of his mind.

“We all have the experience of time disappearing. But usually only for a short time.”

The voice is slow and deep, the words steeped in a German accent. The white-haired speaker sits alongside and lays his stick on the ground.

“Deep down, we all know time is really an illusion. The problem is with our intellect. It keeps pulling us back to our intuitions on time. These intuitions are wrong. Well, we can fight intellect with intellect. Are you ready to fight intellect with intellect?”

Winston hears the scratch of a match followed by puffs and the aroma of pipe smoke.

“We will journey together. We will dismantle this illusion we call time.”

“Time is not everywhere the same. Clocks run more slowly down here than up in the Alpine meadows. Not only mechanical clocks but also the biological clocks. The eggs of a bird will take longer to hatch down here than up there.”

“Why is that?” asks Winston.

“This is because of gravity. The stronger the gravity, the slower the time.”

“So does that mean time is very slow in black holes?”

“Das ist richtig. What we perceive as time, it stops completely when we go through the event horizon of a black hole.”

“And it is not only gravity that makes the thing we call time tick differently. With speed it changes too. If your twin brother flies through space very fast in a rocket, when he gets back he will be younger than you.”

“How do we know this?” Winston asks after a pause.

“The mathematics, it requires it. Also we have proved it experimentally, we have done many measurements, such as on clocks in airplanes.”

“Also, and this is important, there is no universal Now. The light we from all the stars see has been travelling for millions of years. We see those stars as they were millions of years ago. Many of those stars may from shining have stopped. Even in our own solar system, the now on Mars is more than three minutes older than our now, since that is the shortest time possible for information to get to us from Mars. We cannot know what is happening on Mars right now. What do you think will happen if our sun suddenly disappears?”

“We would all die,” says Winston.

“Eventually yes. But we would notice nothing for more than eight minutes. We will know only of the sun exploding eight minutes after the actual explosion. This is when it will suddenly go dark. The earth will continue to rotate around the non-existent sun for the same eight minutes, before flying away at a tangent. This is because gravity also travels at the speed of light and will still pull on the Earth for those eight minutes even after the Sun has disappeared.”

“What we call Now, is different on the Sun by more than eight minutes, is millions of years different on the stars, is different on Mars by three to four minutes. The Now is a very small bubble around us actually.”

“So,” says Winston, his brow furrowed, “You are saying that time is not constant. Where the gravity is different, clocks tick at different rates, even biological clocks like how long it takes for an egg to hatch. You are also saying that time is different for people travelling at different speeds, they age at different rates. And now you are saying that there is no such thing as a single Now across the Universe or even within our own Solar System. Is that right?”

“That is right, yes.” The old man nods approvingly.

“Ja, what is more, the thing we call time is not by itself, instead it is bound up with space into a single entity – which I call spacetime. This spacetime stretches, it deforms.”

“How we say, matter tells spacetime how to curve; spacetime tells matter how to move.”

“Time is a fourth dimension of space actually.”

The old man turns to Winston and a brief smile crosses his lips.

“So … we have done well in dismantling the thing we call time, yes? It has lost its constancy. It has lost its centrality. It has lost its independence.”

Winston nods, his mind spinning. The sun is in the same part of the sky as when he first sat down.

“We will walk now to the water gardens, yes?” says the old man, his eyes sparkling with mischievousness.

 “Yes, I’d like that,” replies Winston.

The old man retrieves his stick and walks with vigorous step. Winston stumbles to catch up. After crossing the road, they enter the serene beauty of the lily ponds, shadowed by bamboo stands, maple trees and weeping willows. Winston feels more drawn to the reflections of clouds and foliage painted across the black stillness of the water than to the famous lilies, beautiful though they are.

“We are not quite finished with demolishing time,” says the old man quietly, standing motionless in an oval patch of sunlight.

“When I was at Princeton, my friend Kurt Gödel created some models using my general relativity and proved that time travel is possible with certain exact solutions. Meaning that we can revisit the past. Of course, if one can revisit the past, the past cannot have passed.”

“He showed therefore that the passage of time cannot exist. Instead it is likely we live in a block universe, where all events are already in existence.”

He pauses. “The world ignores his proof, even today. Poor Kurt, in the end he starved himself to death you know.”

“I am not so young anymore. I see Mr Boltzmann is waiting at the bridge. I will leave you with him now and get some rest.”

A man in a three piece suit stands at the top of the Japanese bridge. A magnificent beard reaches halfway down his chest. He stares fiercely at Winston through his pince-nez glasses.

“People misunderstand me. They make me responsible for the arrow of time. Apart from this so-called second law of thermodynamics, none of the other equations in physics gives a preferred direction for time you understand. Yes, I did say that disorder naturally increases. But pick some low entropy state. It is most likely to have arisen from a high entropy state by a fluctuation and it will most likely to return to a high entropy state. So the so-called arrow of time could just as easily run backwards.”

“What we see as ordered or disordered, depends upon the fineness of our perception. We could say a pack of cards is ordered if it runs A, K, Q, J, 10, ….., 2 for the four suits in sequence. But we could equally well say it is ordered if the colours alternate Red, Black, Red, Black. Or if the first 26 cards are Red and the next 26 cards are Black. Or any number of combinations and permutations. What we see as disordered, is an artefact of our mind rather than a reality.”

“That is all I have to say. The so-called arrow of time is a nonsense. Cross the bridge and you will find Mr Sacks awaits you under the willow trees.”

The man with a barrel chest dips his head with a smile as Winston approaches. His voice is surprisingly high pitched for a man of his size and evident strength.

“After the 1919 flu epidemic, my patients with Encephalitis Lethargica post-encephalitic symptoms, they sat motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, yet they were all perfectly aware.”

“Miss R at age sixty one looked thirty years younger, as if she had been magically preserved by her trance. There were many other patients that behaved, and even appeared, much younger than their years, as if their processes had been arrested.”

“Hester had no subjective time whatever, for her no time had elapsed. Mr V was indeed wiping his nose, but doing so ten thousand times slower than normal – this was proven with a camera.”

“So you mean that people generate their own sense of time? That we might even be able to change how we age?” asks Winston.

“Indeed that seems to be the case,” the burly man said, nodding enthusiastically.

“Say hello to Claude from me,” he says, then flops one hand shyly before slipping away between the trees.

Winston leans across the curved railing of the little bridge. The day seems to be no older than when he arrived, the sun has not moved. The paths remain strangely empty of tourists. His thoughts gyrate back and forth. He has experienced brief periods of timelessness. And what these guys say makes sense. But is time really just an illusion? It seems so real. What’s that? Looks like someone sitting on the other side of the pond. In front of an easel. Could it be … is that really Claude Monet?

… . . . .