The Curious Case of the Arrow of Time: The Vagaries of Preternatural Aging (Section 1)

Section 1

Readers are welcome to use this post series for educational purposes and
I welcome the proper citation/reference back to this source:

Wright, S. (2008). The Curious Case of the Arrow of Time: The Vagaries of Preternatural Aging, Occasional Paper Series, (No. 1), December. University of Utah, Gerontology Interdisciplinary Program, Salt Lake City, UT. 84112

Complete reference list and notes are available in final section of this post topic.

A link to the full PDF version is available in the final section of this post topic.

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The Curious Case of the Arrow of Time: The Vagaries of Preternatural Aging (Section 1)

For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly, than time? And, we understand, when we speak of it; we understand also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.
St. Augustine

What do we do with time?…Time, the supreme ambiguity of the human condition.
Mircea Eliade

Time- invisible, intangible, yet inexorable – is perhaps the most mysterious limit of all. Aging is about living in time. Born into the world at a certain historical moment, destined to pass out of it at a later, uncertain moment, we are creatures who change significantly over a lifetime. For groups as wells as individuals, time brings changes of form and condition.
Thomas R. Cole (The Journey of Life)

Introduction

In a substantive contribution to the literature on the intersect of aging and time, Baars (2007) recommended that there is the need to expand upon the significance of time across the life course beyond the dominant position of chronological time in our theoretical and methodological understanding of the aging process. Baars (2007) proposed that,

An important step toward the development of interdisciplinary conceptual clarification of temporality would be to acknowledge this complexity and threefold nature of its representations, which flow from three constitutive sources: natural rhythms (the foundation of chronological time), personal experiences or perspectives, and socioculutral contexts (including narratives) (p. 37).

One example of empirical research that expounds on the complexity and the interdisciplinarity of temporality is the work of Carstensen (2006) who proposed that the subjective sense of remaining time in life (versus passage of time since birth) is a better predictor than chronological age for a range of cognitive, emotional, and motivational variables. Carstensen (2006) found that there is a motivational shift in priorities with age (younger versus older people), yet whether young or old, when people perceive time as finite, they attach greater importance to finding emotional meaning and satisfaction from life and invest fewer resources into gathering information and expanding horizons. Other examples, include Draaisma’s (2006) work on the debatable notion of “Why life speeds up as you get older” and why it seems like humans are “a long time young, and a short time old,” and then the interesting study by Crawley and Pring (2000) who examined the question of whether time acceleration would be reflected in the objective dating of public events in people of different ages. They found that the tendency to date events too recently appears to diminish with age so that older people believe events happened earlier than they actually did, thus perhaps explaining why “time appears to fly past with age” (p. 120).

My goal in this review essay is to avoid the ground already covered in relation to epistemological and methodological concerns of the temporality of aging which has been previously addressed in the scholarship of many others in the field (Baars, 1997; Baars & Visser, 2007; McFadden & Atchely 2001; and Mizruchi, Glassner, & Pastorello, 1982). What I intend to do is to further examine the conceptual notion of time’s arrow and temporality in the domain of life course development and aging in various sociocultural contexts especially as it has been presented as an overarching theme or motif in the media of film, music, and literature in the past sixty years and into the 21st century. In this regard, I hope to build upon the momentum of noted scholars such as W. Andrew Achenbaum (2008), Thomas R. Cole (1997) and Ronald Manheimer (2008) who have explored the nuances of the historical, the educational, and the sociocultural dimensions of aging by weaving a coherent system of meaning into our individual and collective selves as aging beings (see also Manheimer, 1999/2000).

Perhaps the most cogent way to begin this review essay is to have you consider the phrase, “Once upon a time…,” and reflect on how this standardized opening to many stories, myths and fables usually sets the stage for a narrative with larger than life characters in far away lands (think: the Star Wars saga – “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”) and a declarative message (“the moral of the story is…”) that the reader will weave into their imagination and personality. The narrative usually has a bookend phrase of “…happily ever after,” that connotes a vague trajectory of timelessness into the future – where the life course coasts into blissful and uneventful chronological aging. Or at least until another story comes long. And in between the bookends of opening and closing – are the stories, the music, and the art, and the cinematic creations that give meaning (similar to Stendhal’s “walking mirror”; see Weinstein, 2006) to our lives over time.

And in time with all of its facets as painted in the numinous verse of T.S. Eliot (1971a) in “Burnt Norton” of Four Quartets (see Kramer, 2007; Verma, 1979),

Once upon a time…
In the cinema classic, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (released in 1969 and directed by George Roy Hill), there is a great set of lines (among so many!) by Paul Newman playing Butch Cassidy who was talking to the card-playing Sundance Kid played by Robert Redford in a saloon setting,

Butch Cassidy spoke of the aging process as equivalent to the expectation of the sun coming up in the east each day; it was simply the law and there was no going around it. Every day you get older. Of course! We take such a statement as so axiomatic and in every bit as fundamental that it carries the same heavy burden of other elemental certainties such as gravity, death and taxes. Yet, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid broke the law many times over with robbing trains and banks and it also appears that breaking the law of getting older is an alluring theme in Hollywood too. And I’m not talking about plastic surgery, and laser and botox treatments; rather I’m referring to the movie industry tapping into the wellspring of literature and screenplays that not only challenges our understanding of the inevitability of the aging process as both inexorable and irreversible, but also having creative license with exhibiting visual techniques and plot devices that flip the unidirectional and linear flow of time on its head – and then some.

Case in point: The movie, The Curious Case Benjamin Button, which is scheduled for release at the end of December 2008, represents a continuing thread of media projects that embrace the fantastical notion of reversing the aging process. The movie, directed by David Fincher, features Benjamin Button, played by Brad Pitt, as an old man who physically ages backward. It appears that Hollywood wanted to go for the daily double by having one of its perennial sex symbols not only play ‘Death’ (what better way to personify the grim reaper?) in the 1998 movie, Meet Joe Black, (and based on the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday), and then in this movie, he is born an old man and ages in reverse until he becomes a baby and then finally vanishes from the earth. At age 50, he falls in love with a 30-year-old woman played by Cate Blanchett. And then he must come to terms with the relationship as they literally grow in opposite directions.

Brad Pitt (Benjamin Button)

The movie is, of course, based on the short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and first appeared in 1922. Bruccoli (2003) indicated that, “Fitzgerald was probably attracted to this form by its tension between romanticism and realism, for the challenge of fantasy is to make impossible events convincing” (p. 159). Bruccoli indicated that Fitzgerald provided the inspiration for “Benjamin Button” when he collected it in Tales of the Jazz Age (1922):

This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying to experiment upon one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s “Note Books” (p. 159).

Another example: The movie, Youth Without Youth, which was released in 2007 and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, was Coppola’s creative exploration into two areas of cinematic language: Time and Interior Consciousness. He found both target areas in the work of Mircea Eliade’s book of the same title (Youth Without Youth). Youth Without Youth is a World War II–era film about an elderly professor whose mysterious rejuvenation makes him a target for the Nazis and is further described as a love story wrapped in a mystery.

Eliade’s book was originally published in 1978 in Germany and first published in the United States in 1988, and is also available in the University of Chicago University Press edition (2007). Coppola, in the forward of the 2007 edition, stated that his interest in the intersecting topics of time and philosophical speculation were both professional and personal,

…at the time, I was a sixty-six year old man who had spent years on a screenplay that I was never able to complete to my satisfaction, reading about a man who had become seventy with the fear that he had begun to lose his powers and would never be able to complete his life’s work, and who quite amazingly finds himself made young again. And not only put back into the prime of his life, in better physical shape than ever, but like Faust – granted his deepest wish, to have his intellectual abilities greatly enlarged along with his memory and other “powers” (p. viii).

Faust indeed. Here is an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust (Part One) with Mephistopheles raining down on Faust’s parade,

No wonder Coppola made the literary and historical connection back to Faust in relation to both the plot of Eliade’s book and to his own goal of directing another experimental movie into his late sixties (Coppola was born in 1939). It was though the inspiration to his first movie in over a decade was based on his desire to stay in the hunt as a master within the craft of filmmaking and to show the world, as Richard Corliss of Time magazine stated in his review, “the great American director of the ‘70s has survived with his operatic intensity intact.” But what is curious about Coppola’s statement is the confessional tone that revealed a sense of regret due to the running out of time in his own journey of life while in search of the elusive holy grail within one’s craft. This is especially surprising when put into context of him being a five-time Academy-award winner and directing the cinematic masterpieces of The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now. It is though you can detect in the selected passages above that the quest for the magnum opus for both Faust (via Goethe) and Coppola is in jeopardy due to the finite properties of the human life course and the only solution is to have a another chance at the game of life so that a critical part of the Faustian equation is to regain youth and vigor, but with the added bonus of keeping a lifetime of knowledge and wisdom intact. Evidently this must be where the proverbial bargain is struck with the devil, because there are always strings attached for “having one’s cake and eat it too” when manipulating time’s arrow. And this seems to be the case whether the manipulation was the result of a lightning strike, an alchemical potion, a dip into the fountain of youth, or the flippant decree from one of the gods on Mount Olympus.

I would like to offer a taxonomy for clustering the various schemes that permeate the literature and media when experimenting and exploring the malleability of the arrow of time in the context of the aging process; but first, a quick review of the concept of the “arrow of time.”
First and foremost, it is important to recognize that the phrase “time’s arrow” has been an equal opportunity descriptor and label in the sciences and the humanities and in the electronic databases of both areas, such that it has currency in seemingly disparate domains of theoretical physics and metaphysics. And therein lies a whole nother thing.

Evidently, “time’s arrow” is one of those sacred-cow terms that can reveal contested turf issues in the academy. It is beyond the scope of this review to go any deeper into that tangent, but I will remind our readers of how we must all carefully cross the boundaries of multi-and interdisciplinary scholarship especially when the social sciences and humanities poach (and encroach?) upon the concepts of sciences and then in the process of (mis) translation there is the inadvertent misconstruing of the original meaning and the resulting outcome are the layers upon layers of shoddy claims and misguided implications for policy and interventions. 1

So, as a social-behavioral scientist I am keeping my feet on the ground and treading carefully into the domain of physics (opposite the approach of Uffink, 2007), yet I am comforted that by the thought when dabbling in the world of Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Brian Greene (see also Barbour, 2001; Pickover, 1999; Price, 1997) and trying to understand the nuances of time-asymmetric quantum mechanics, we can always fall back to Einstein’s quip about explaining relativity and the bend-ability of time, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity,” (see also Bourne, 2006; Lightman, 1993). And perhaps we can also give credit to the music group Pink Floyd, who in their own way, captured the essence of physics and aging and the onslaught of time, in their song “Time” (from the 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon) when they succinctly stated that, “The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death.”

At the most basic level, the “Arrow of Time” (used by Arthur Eddington for the first time in 1927) or Direction of Time, Asymmetry of Time, Anisotropy of Time, Irreversibility of Time, Unidirectionality of Time, are all terms used in a synonymous way and used to imply that time is sliced into past, present and future and that it always passes from past to the future and not in a reverse way (Altekar, 1998). In the physical sciences, processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time symmetric, meaning that the theoretical statements that describe them remain true if the direction of time is reversed; however, macroscopic processes appear to be temporally “directed” in some sense and there is an obvious direction or flow of time. Thus, an arrow of time is anything that exhibits time-asymmetry and thermodynamics (in particular the second law of thermodynamics) is the science that describes much of the time-asymmetric behavior found in the world (Callender, 2006; Carrol, 2008; Castagnino, Gadella, & Lombardi, 2005; Uffink, 2007).

If we take the thermodynamic arrow as a fundamental and use it to understand other temporally asymmetric features of the world, (e.g., causation, knowledge), we may be able to apply the significance of time’s arrow to other phenomena as well. For example, in Draaisma’s (2001) insightful book, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past, there is the provocative lead-in and question,

When recalling the events you invariably enter from the other side, so to speak: in the filing system of your memory the most recent event lies on top, like bank statements in a folder, and if you page back you will find Y before X. But why then do we remember forwards and not backwards? (p. 55).

Although Hawking (1996) proposed three arrows of time: 1) a thermodynamic arrow of time where entropy or disorder increases; 2) a psychological arrow of time which allows us to remember a past but not a future; 3) and a cosmological arrow of time in which our universe expands rather than contracts (Davies, 2006; Hawking, 2008), the taxonomies offered by Altekar (1998) and Callender (2006) are more elaborate. For example, Altekar proposes six kinds of arrows of time: (1) Thermodynamic Arrow of Time, (2) Electromagnetic Arrow of Time, (3) Biological Arrow of Time, (4) Psychological Arrow of Time, (5) Sociological Arrow of Time, and (6) Cosmological Arrow of Time.

In essence, the biological arrow of time offers a framework of understanding for the evolutionary process, and pertinent to this discussion, the received view within biogerontology is that we all experience the aging process as unidirectional and irreversible. We do not expect to grow young with the passage of time. Yet, despite the fact the human organism is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, Uffink (2007) has proffered the necessary caveats when trying to exclusively apply these laws as a general theory toward aging, especially when taking into account the complexities of the human organism in the biological, psychological, and social domains.

Before we engage the contemporary concepts affiliated with the prospect of reversing the aging process (anti-aging), let us review some exemplars in the media and literature in relation to time’s arrow and preternatural aging in: 1) protracted aging – where aging is extended in beyond normal expectations and sometimes to the extreme as a punishment or a curse; and then 2) suspended aging – where aging is “put on hold” or postponed for a period of time. I will then return to examples of preternatural aging where the aging process runs counter to time’s arrow. This is categorized as 3) contra-aging (contretemps) or aging-in-reverse which offers a rich and imaginative catalyst in literary and historical fiction. All three sections will offer interesting intersections with the socio-cultural and psychological arrow of time.

To be continued >>>> Please follow into the next posting – Thanks – Scott Wright