Time Has Told Me

Well, it's been a few weeks, but I finally got some time and motivation to sit down and write a quick blog post.

I'm getting settled in at IU, and have found much to admire about Bloomington and the university over the past few weeks. One of the things I admire most about the campus, though, are the many pithy phrases carved into the exterior and interior walls of the buildings I frequently pass by or through in the course of a typical weekday. So, I thought I might share a few of these with you over the next few weeks, as I have occasion to reflect on them.

One phrase that has been on my mind lately is carved into one of the exterior walls of Ballantine Hall - a large, imposing structure in the center of the South part of campus, which houses (among other things) the main offices of the English department. On one wall, there is a carving with an inscription that reads "Veritas Filia Temporis." You can see a picture of it by following this link.

For those of you who didn't learn Latin in high school, the inscription means (roughly) "truth is the daughter of time." In other words, Time is the father of Truth. Truth springs inevitable from the eternal loins of Time. Time strips every untruth bare, corrects every lie and error. "Truth," as another saying goes, "will out."

One might ask, at this point, "is that really true?" From my own short time of education and experience, I can say, Yes. Sometimes.

Another way to look at this nice little aphorism might be to say that any quest for truth requires time, which I can certainly verify from my experience. My own searching after truth in grad school has cost me much in time, and will cost much more time before it is over. And this assumes that the culmination of my Ph.D. will complete that search, which it likely will not.

So we might also read the epigram this way: truth, being the daughter of time, thus shares time's qualities: it is eternal, it is constant, and it exists in a realm outside of any human. But it is also, therefore, just as elusive as time. Remember that other Latin epigram about time: Tempus fugit. Time flies (literally, it "flees"). Truth, too, has a tendency to get away from us.

I have an hourglass that sits on my desk, and it is just as impossible to arrest those slipping grains of sand for one instant as it is to get a firm grasp on any one truth. I can apprehend time's passage, and I can become familiar enough with it that I can go through a day with relative ease, comfortable within time's rhythms. But if I stop and try to nail time down, distinguish one discrete moment from the next, when present becomes past and the future becomes the now, I am at a loss.

Time remains in a world apart from mine. So, too, with truth, the daughter of time.

Some might think such reflection on truth and time is, in fact, a waste of time, and I'm inclined to think they're probably right. But I can't help it. It's carved into the side of a building I pass by every day. You'd be just as haunted.

Perhaps more epigrams will follow in the coming weeks. Time, I guess, will tell...