A good hilltop (Muxia, Spain)

(I am retro-posting this entry – I wrote it on July 30th and will manipulate my blog’s date and time marker so that it reflects that fact!)

I just met several interesting people at the top of the boulder-covered hill that dominates the Muxia landscape! Francoise and Danielle are two French women who are driving back to France along the Spanish coast and camping along the way. They were extremely pleasant, very kind faces (I automatically trust people with very kind faces), and we talked on the top of the hill for a good hour.

For Danielle, time and life were the same thing, or bound to each other. Time existed to mark the progression of life; if there were no life, there would be no time. I asked if she thought time would exist if the planet were devoid of life and nothing changed, and she said no. There must be change in order for time to exist. She further described time as a number of helices – cycles with direction – like many “escargot” making patterns on the dirt. When asked how she measured time, she laughed at pointed to her sunspots. As she aged, she got more sunspots – that is the passage of time. She said that she first became aware of the passage of time when she was eighteen or so, taking a philosophy course in her last year of high school. Before that, she had always lived in the present, and after that had started thinking about time. When thinking about her life, she divided it into several twenty-year cycles. From 0-20 she was a child and student; from 20-40 she was working; and she was currently towards the end of the third cycle. She looked forward to the fourth! “What will it be like?” she wondered. I asked if time occasionally went faster or slower, and she answered “No no no no no.” As she got older, she lived more and more in the present, and time never seemed to go quickly for her. This was effortless; she wasn’t doing it consciously. I asked if she did meditation, and she said that she did occasionally in a yoga class, but that that was artificial. It is impossible to be wholly aware of the present if you are sitting in a room with good posture; when she was really in the moment was at times like this, sitting on top of the hill, watching the sun on the ocean and talking.

For Francoise, time was “the hours, the days . . .” She said that she also divided her life into different chunks, but they had more to do with where she was living than a set period of time. She had lived in Brittany as a child – one tome – then had studied there – second tome – then had moved to Paris – third tome – then had moved to the center of France – fourth tome. She said that she became aware of the passage of time when she started working; furthermore, since she started working, time started going faster and faster. I asked if she remembered planning a lot for the future, or fantasizing about it, as a child and as an adult, and she said that she had often fantasized but not planned. She liked to think about what would happen, but didn’t consider any of her plans solid. Francoise did not think that time was inextricably linked to life or nature – it is something that exists regardless. I can’t remember if she said that it existed since the beginning of the universe or always.

I also met a young Hungarian couple. The man works as an interpreter, so his English was excellent, and he found my project fascinating. He asked me a lot of questions about the questions I asked other people – so, of course, I started “interviewing” him as an answer. He said that time was a way of marking the passage of life, both human and non-human. It is divided into arbitrary artificial units like hours and seconds because humans thousands of years ago thought to do so. That’s all I got from him, because the sunset turned pretty and he went to sit with his girlfriend. I was sitting behind them, and I took a Hallmark-romantic picture of their silhouettes against the sun (“CREEP,” you might think – but they were genuinely pleased when I showed it to them, and I am going to e-mail it to them), of which I am immensely proud.

All in all, a heartwarming evening-turned-night. And I really want to visit Francoise and Danielle in the middle of France!