All Infinities Are Small

"Watchmen," and the illusion of time.

Why does the passing of time make us sad?

Of all the ideas that occurred to me upon finishing Watchmen, this is the one that has stayed in the forefront of my mind.

It’s hard to say what the book is about, really. There are so many characters, each with their own story, their own worldview, their own implication. The world looks different to Rorschach than it looks to Dan Dreiberg. And, just like in real life, all of these perspectives are imperfect in their own way.

Of all the complex, profoundly human characters in this book, the one that stuck out to me the most was, quite literally, the least ‘human’ of them all: Dr. Manhattan, (who will be referred to here henceforth as Jon Osterman). His strange, ‘superhuman’ status has allowed him to see beyond the human experience, but this expanded perception does not make him flawless. His enhanced perception is a double-edged sword—it allows him to view human life with an impartiality that human beings do not possess, but it removes a great deal of his empathy. His worldview seems impossibly bleak (a necessary condition of being alone, not just in your life but in the history of your species). Ironically, this loneliness—and the existential questions it poses—only make the character seem more ‘human.’

Consider the conversation Jon has with Laurie in Chapter 9. The entire future of the universe is in flux. Jon insists that it is predetermined, and cannot be changed. He says this:

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

Then Dr. Manhattan asks Laurie to recall her earliest memory. She says she cannot remember. He insists that she can.

“It isn’t gone. It’s still here. Let yourself see it.”

Let yourself see it, as though what’s preventing us from accessing all of our deepest and most forgotten memories is our own limitation. Maybe we repressed them. Maybe it’s our imperfect brains themselves that impose this limited memory upon us. But either way, this is suggesting that it can be accessed. Empowered by this suggestion, she accesses it.

Reading this, I became overwhelmed by the profound sadness of being, of time passing. Some of it was empathy for Laurie (during this scene she uncovers a painful secret that had been right in front of her for some time, suggesting that we might just be what’s holding us back from our own memories). I think why I felt sad, though, was because the scene reminded me of one of my early memories, and all of the ones that I’ve forgotten.

I don’t remember much from my childhood, but every once in a while I get a glimpse into it. Yesterday I was standing outside of my house, which is right next to my grandfather’s house. I spent a lot of time there growing up, and spent a lot of time later on avoiding the place completely. Now I’m back.

I was waiting outside with my dog, who suddenly started sniffing around a little passageway with a fence on one side and a wall on the other. The passageway leads to a larger fenced-off area, which contains a staircase to the house’s basement. The place is easy to overlook. Except for in the fall, that is, when the staircase becomes a haven for thousands of dead leaves.

The dog attempted to walk through it, and I pulled him back. This was when I became flooded with memories. I saw myself as a child, squeezing through the fence, into the fenced-off nook covered in soggy autumn leaves. If there were only a few leaves there, it would be my job to clean them—I was small enough to be able to squeeze through the passageway, so my grandfather wouldn’t need to unlock the fence. He’d be sweeping the rest of the street, and I’d be at the bottom of those steps, shoveling leaves and putting them in plastic bags.

This was just one of the ‘jobs’ Grandpa and I did together. I used to love them. Each day would be a little adventure—into the dark, musky ‘cellar’ containing the electrical panels and all of the stuff that would be stored there and eventually forgotten about, or the smelly butcher shop with sawdust on the floor.

All of the stuff we did together. And now I’m back again—right next door. It’s strange how time catches up to you. It’s almost like I traced a jagged edge of that crystal right back to the center, where it almost intersected another edge but missed it by only a millimeter. The same place, but a different time. How different is it really? A lot of the same people are here. Some are gone. Some are new. The familiar ones are older. Damaged, but also wiser.

If time is really the way Jon said it was, all spread out and permanent like a jewel, all existing at once, then why did remembering a childhood that I can no longer perceive sadden me? It’s still there, just on the opposite side of the jewel. Why does it hurt to look back and realize that you’re not a child anymore, that the people who you knew when you were a child aren’t as young as they were before, that you can’t be in the past in the present, or anywhere and anywhere else at the same time. Why is it sad that your old house doesn’t look the same and your family doesn’t look the same and you don’t look the same? If all of those moments are just as real as they always were, if the reason they’re not there now is just a problem of perception, this should be comforting, right? The great times aren’t lost, just past.

Somehow, though, this idea only makes it worse. It means these memories are finite. And it doesn’t change the horrific reality that even though they’re still there, they’re gone to you. We all think in terms of the way things affect us. What do we care if the moments are permanent if we’re not? What use is a crystal with all of this beauty spread out if we can only see it one tiny speck at a time, and by the time we even know it’s happening we’re on to the next? And all we’re left with are memories that are foggy and kind of hurt to the touch, and they fade more and more with each passing second. And even as you’re living with these memories the world is already thrusting you into the future, a future where they will not be there at all, and you won’t be there at all, either.

Where do we really live? It’s certainly not in the house where we grew up—we can understand why this type of residence is temporary, and why the new places we inhabit are equally so. Perhaps we live only in our own minds, in the ‘present,’ so to speak. But how can this be so, if by the time we process it it’s already past? Does this mean we live in the future, which will never be what we think it will be, even if we’re looking only as far as one second? In the past, becoming increasingly distorted by our imperfect memory?

In this chapter (Chapter 9) of Watchmen, something rare happens: Jon learns something. When describing his ‘crystallized time’ hypothesis, he asserts that because time is crystallized, it is predetermined. There is one destiny laid out for you, and it cannot be changed. It raises the question: if time is crystallized, how do we account for choice? Jon’s answer is that we don’t have a choice; it only seems like we do.

Perhaps this is true. Maybe ‘free will is an illusion that beings like us think is true because we can’t see this elaborate superstructure which governs our lives. I don’t think so, though, and I don’t think Alan Moore does, either. In the story, Jon ‘sees’ something in the future, thinks it is predetermined, and then learns that it isn’t. He makes the complete opposite choice from the one he thought he was going to make. This had never happened to him before. Maybe it was just a fluke. Or maybe his ‘heightened’ awareness was still imperfect. It allowed him to see some more of the ‘crystal’ than an ordinary human (seeing multiple of the ‘edges’ that we call time at once, instead of just seeing one), but his vision was still limited.

This poses a strange question. Let’s assume that free will does exist. How can we reconcile this with the ‘crystallized time’ hypothesis? The only way it could exist is if there were infinite universes, one for each possible choice that we make. If all the ‘answer choices’ are predetermined, but what is not predetermined is which one we are going to pick.

This possibility wouldn’t actually oppose the concept of ‘crystallized time.’ The structure would just stretch outward further than we could possibly imagine, one branch for each choice, each turn, each glance in an opposite direction. And if these all exist simultaneously, then ‘you’ are every potentiality of you, the one who made all the right choices and the one who made all the wrong choices, and this is not made any less true because you happen to be perceiving only one of the many possibilities.

Maybe this is finally comforting. That means there’s a version of you out there who chose to spend that extra time with that person that the current you took for granted. Of course, even though the choices seem like they would go on infinitely, the potentialities are ultimately finite. ‘You’ (meaning every potential incarnation of you) will run out of choices eventually, run out of moments. A human life can only extend so long. But the possibilities seem so vast to us, in our single, one-shot lives, that this finite doesn’t seem so scary. It’s so vast compared to what we expect out of our own lives that it is, for our purposes, close enough to an infinity that we can actually conceptualize it as one.

Does ‘true’ infinity even exist? In that space-time structure each life is finite (even if it takes on a shape that’s much bigger than we, observing one edge of it, realize). Does that mean the only possibility of ‘infinity’ is if there are infinite number of lives, an infinite number of people that have existed/will exist?

Or do we just have to look for infinity in different places? We know that mathematical infinity exists. Numbers can extend bigger and bigger outward, and, inversely, can be split up into smaller and smaller pieces between each number. Could this be the same with ‘real’ infinities? Could each moment be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, smaller and smaller snippets, until that moment, through keen observation, actually becomes an infinity?

Imagine that you were an immortal being living inside this crystal that goes on for miles upon miles upon beautiful miles. The crystal is not exactly infinite, but you are. After you discovered all that there was to discover, explored every inch of your intricate reality, wouldn’t you go back and start studying everything in greater and greater detail? You could always keep discovering more about these same moments, notice a momentary flicker in a person’s eye, perhaps, or a sudden turn as a thought enters their mind. You could understand their motivations, the subtle context that underlies every second. What is this, besides an ‘infinity inside of an infinity’? 

We have no way of knowing whether life or the universe has a beginning or an end. In all likelihood, it does. Everything ends. It seems to be one of the divine ‘laws’ of the universe.

There’s so much we can learn from words. Think about the structure of the word ‘infinite.’ Its root word is ‘finite.’ ‘In’ is the prefix added onto it. ‘Finite’ is the standard, and ‘infinite’ a modified inverse.

Remember, though, that everything that it exists has its opposite. Just because an infinity exists inwardly instead of outwardly, does that make it any less real? Maybe infinity exists, just not in the way we expect. Maybe the only infinities are small.