Time Will Tell: Julian Barbour's The Janus Point

Julian Barbour is the author of The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time (Basic Books, 2020).

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. But if I wish to explain it to him who asks the question, I do not know.”

– Saint Augustine, ca. 399 CE.

I’ve always been fascinated with time and the concept of time’s passage. Who isn’t? All right, I’ll even admit to being obsessed with time, but not in any detrimental or depressing way, just as on ongoing subject of dreams, contemplation, speculation, wonderment, awe, and as perhaps the most ideal subject for so many kinds of art, music and poetry. It’s at the very beating aesthetic heart of what the French critic Gaston Bachelard called the dialectics of duration. As a kid, I recall being quite certain that time doesn’t really move forward at all, from past to present to future, but rather backwards, filling the present with potential energy and emptying itself out in the past as the expended kinetic energy of history. Every kid knows that time must work backwards until it stops, since otherwise we’d be trapped in an endless loop going nowhere. Most kids, however, tend to grow up, I suppose.

Two Women: Promising Young Woman and I’m Your Woman

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman. 

Promising Young Woman begins as a black comedy-horror picture about the revenge that Cassie (Carey Mulligan) takes on young men who see a single woman drunk off her ass in a bar as an opportunity to get laid. It turns out that she’s motivated by the suicide of her best friend Nina, who was raped at a med-school party and couldn’t get justice because of the callousness of their social group, the indifference of the administration and the brutality of the rapist’s expensive lawyer. The movie, which was written and directed by Emerald Fennell, is so single-minded – wasn’t there one woman who viewed the video the rapist’s best pal circulated of Nina’s humiliation who didn’t find it hilarious? – that its opportunistic manipulation of the audience in the #MeToo era might have been infuriating. But it’s such a wretched, inept piece of rabble-rousing that what it mostly demonstrates is how little you have to exert yourself, apparently, to get a rise out of viewers. Thelma and Louise looks sophisticated by comparison.