Nausea and Time

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea a man named Antoine expresses a vivid discontent with his world. Antoine is overcome with a visceral sense that the material world is mere “brute” reality––it is just there with little if any reason for or meaning behind anything. These realizations cause Antoine to feel alienated from others, and himself, as he describes his existential unease as nausea. 

There is a similar homesick-like nausea endemic today. This sense of unease, an agitated aimlessness, is becoming more prevalent in those I pastor and connect with in general. There’s a frustratingly elusive lack of meaning and purpose. We are all, in a word, untethered and feel the gut-drop of falling. This is merely one result of how our experience of time has changed due to technological advances and online life, not to mention the massive shifts in social life over the last decade. For instance, a 2022 study conducted with students in Uruguay during the pandemic showed psychological distress linked to changes in time perception.

As temporal, bodily creatures whose essence is what Martin Heidegger calls being-in-the-world, when our perception of time in the world is altered it can disrupt our very sense of self. Only when we expand our grasp on time will we flourish as creatures-in-time.

The Problem of Time

Heidegger, along with Einstein, viewed time as relative. Time isn’t a constant “thing”, rather it is a way for us to conceive of our being-there. In this sense, Heidegger says we are time––our existence constitutes the being-there where events take place, which we perceive as passing time. But our perception of being-there in time is not always the same.

Consider how time understood this way affects temporal creatures psychologically. If time can be “stretched and squeezed” (as Dr. Brand says in Interstellar) then those who perceive it must likewise feel the disorienting effects of that movement. For example, we’re all familiar with the whiplash of swiping through TikToks or Instagram Shorts for a few minutes, only to realize we’ve been doomscrolling for two hours. There’s a real sense of reality-slip when this happens; our perception of time has been altered and it leaves us feeling disoriented and thin.

In Thomas Pynchon’s book Gravity’s Rainbow, one character describes this common reality-slip in what he calls “temporal bandwidth”:

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now…. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even… what you’re doing here”

We can think of this “Now” situated temporally between the past and the future. The more we dwell in both past and future the thicker our “Now” becomes, and as a result the thicker we become as beings-in-time.

The thicker we are, the more stable our sense of being-there in reality becomes. In his aptly named poem, History, Wendell Berry describes to a friend a place he has become familiar with. At one point he writes:

All the lives this place
has had, I have. I eat
my history day by day.
By feasting on history, he widens to the thickness of shared life. 

However, the more we focus solely on our “Now” cut off from our past and future, our “Now” becomes narrow, and our sense of being becomes much more thin and fragile.

Unfortunately, our digital age exacerbates this. It both allows us to live more accelerated lives, thus warping our perception of time, while primarily consuming information, which is inherently “Now”-focused. Information, according to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, has no distance or expanse. It is by nature cut-up bits void of meaningful pasts or futures, which affects our perception of time:

Digitalization intensifies the atrophy of time. Reality disintegrates into information that is relevant only briefly. Information lives on the allure of surprise. It thus fragments time. Our attention also becomes fragmented. Information does not permit any lingering. In the accelerated exchange of information, bits of information quickly replace each other.

Everything is available in a narrow “Now”, untethered from a history or a meaningful future. The more information we consume (and the quicker we do so), the more untethered, thin, and fragile we feel as persons. Our “temporal bandwidth” is paper thin; we inhabit what Hartmut Rosa calls a “shrinking present.” 

Marc Wittmann, co-author of the 2022 Uruguay study and author of Felt Time, names the alienating toll of this:

Everything is done all at once, faster and faster, yet no personal balance or meaning can be found. This implies the loss of contact with one's own self. We also no longer feel "at home" with ourselves and find it difficult to persist in any given activity because we are available at every moment

For Heidegger, this aimlessness is a result of severing the “Now” from past and future. To do so is to be at odds with the essence of time––our being-there––which includes both past and future! He says time is a dynamic unfurling whose stages stand in a relation of earlier and later to one another. There can be no “unfurling” without past and future. James Davison Hunter recently identified our rapidly approaching nihilistic age as resulting from such a lack of shared future or cultural telos. 

What Hunter diagnoses culturally is playing out psychologically: to live in the immediate brevity and meaninglessness of information is not only disintegrating shared cultural narratives, but also the very nature of our being-there––in other words, we feel reduced to a meaningless being-nowhere.

Our problem of meaning is a problem of time. Therefore, to flourish as temporal creatures whose essence is being-there, we must experience the unfurling of our “Now” from the past and into the future. In other words, we must expand time. 

The Promise of Time

The Christian story is one of both time and promise. It is the story of the promised Redeemer––one who entered into time and space, the everlasting God taking on the form of being-there. Heidegger himself admitted that the theologian is the legitimate expert on time! This is because only the story of the God who spans past and future can make sense of the “Now.” 

Indeed, the entire Bible is, as Christopher Watkin says, “X”-shaped:

The incarnation is the pin-point that gives meaning to the now, in that it is the event in time which all time before it anticipated and from which all time sense unfolds.

All time––past and future––unfurls bidirectionally from the incarnation of the Son of God. Watkin likewise notes that “because the Christian view of time includes an ending, history can be, and is, meaningful.” Christianity promises the distance necessary for meaning––not merely an ancient past, but an imperishable future. 

Han shares this understanding of the Christian story as one that breathes meaning into time:

Christian religion is a meta-narrative that reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each day is meaningful.

It is the “X”-shaped story of Scripture that expands our “Now” and injects it with meaning.

The Practice of Time

If we are to become thick, solid selves this side of Jesus’ incarnation, we must inhabit the expanding time of Scripture. One of the primary ways the church has done this historically is by inhabiting the book of Psalms. The Psalter is like a “little Bible”––a condensed picture of God’s past deeds and future promises for his people. 

As the shared songs and prayers of the covenant community, the Psalms are inherently relational. They force us to come together—embodying what Heidegger called our being-with-one-another—and dwell both in the past by remembering and the future by hoping, widening our “temporal bandwidth” and thus thickening us with inspired memory. 

In his science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis includes a fascinating musing by Hyoi on how memory forms us this way:

A pleasure is fully grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then⁠—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.

Heidegger would agree with Lewis: the pleasure and its memory––although separated in time––are one thing. Both are in the being-there. Yet, the past memory accessed in time changes Hyoi’s future: it makes something in him all his days. In other words, it thickens his “Now” and thus he is thickened. 

This is how we thicken within the story of Scripture. Jesus’ incarnation was God’s definitive entrance into time to redeem his people. Each call to “recount”, “recall”, or “remember” in the Psalms is an invitation to inhabit an encounter with that God in an ever-expanded sense. Our remembrance of it makes something in us. 

Such is the nature of story and song––they embed themselves as memory and “run ahead” through time, as Heidegger says, expanding their pleasure. In this way, story and song are anti-information. Rather than fragmented “bits” they are powerful forms of narration––a narrative with breadth that Han says alone can offer meaning.

Again Berry, in his poem A Vision, reflects on the force of such narrative memory:

Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
Light.

The memory of the past expands into the narrative of song, which becomes the present practice of sacrament, which leads to the abundance of future indwelling light. 

The Psalms are a small but important part of a “tradition”––a larger history––in which we can locate ourselves. They provide the moral seriousness and purpose that the children of an amoral and nihilistic age long for. They train us in the practice of expanding time, gathering as believers in the acts of remembering and hoping.

***

Our “Now” can have meaning because Meaning himself entered into time. Jesus Christ is promise-in-time. All past and all future belong to his story of creation, incarnation, and redemption. The thickest person to ever exist––the Alpha and Omega, eternally dwelling in both past and future––has invited us to follow him. As we move with him in our “Now” he makes something in us, widening us out of nihilism, until we reach his eternal abundance and light.