15  The Definition of Now

Professor Luca Cangemi begins the conclusion of the one-hour talk containing his life’s work. He holds his Swiss watch to his ear. It’s such a precision instrument, he can’t hear the faintest tick.

“The Julian calendar was mandated in 46 BC,” he says. “Horologists produced the first pendulum clock less than four hundred years ago. GMT arrived in 1880, then came atomic time precision and even recalibrating ‘leap seconds’. Yet, time is still inaccurate.”

For a moment, he pauses, drinking in the expectation of the audience. That little four-letter word consumes him every second of every day. Perhaps it does for some of them too. In this long moment of reflection, the watch remains clamped to Luca’s ear. He listens to its non-tick.

“The answer to the riddle of time is not a destination. It’s a journey you have to take on your own.”

The digital bell sounds three times, hanging in the air like dots between one hundred and eighty possible realisations.

Luca stiffens. There’s a space. Just one. It’s a gap which any of the minds present could occupy given enough shuffling around. Cangemi pictures the audience as one of those ‘fifteen puzzles’ – a four-by-four block of slidable pieces with one empty square. It took Bobby Fischer just seventeen seconds to solve one on Carson in 1972. It’s taken Cangemi seventeen years to see it clearly.

He looks longingly at the space. It contains a different approach to solving the paradox of time. He could quit teaching, start again and focus more on enjoying the present moment. Breaking his pattern of error and regret fills him with the kind of excitement he’s not experienced since those two coffee-stained weeks with Gisella.

From the looks on some of their faces, Luca can tell there is an epiphany coming to them. The empty space is the missing piece that could make them all happy –– the girl who demands two tutoring sessions per week, the tall kid with acne scars, the mature student sitting off to the side, and this year’s ‘time travel guy’. And Angela. Whatever Angela wants, he will make time for her after the lecture because she deserves more than a letter of recommendation and an awkward kiss on the cheek goodbye.

Finally, he speaks. “I hope that this talk has inspired you to think about your relationship with time.” He smiles. “For what is life without it?”

The bell sounds again and the exodus begins.

Before considering amendments to the universally agreed laws of time, the Council of Time chair gives a full reading of the term in question: “‘Now’ is an adverb identically defined in most languages. It refers to a conscious present moment relative to any individual who thinks, believes, utters or writes it.”

One Luca Cangemi, Professor of Philosophy, born AD 1972, approaches the council to state his case. “My motion to change the definition of ‘now’ is not based on scientific proof, but on shared emotion.”

Despite vehement disagreement from Sir Newton, the man’s right to speak is upheld.

Cangemi cuts a curious figure. His Italian suit exudes quality, but he wields a tatty briefcase. Despite his racing heart, he speaks to the council in a sombre, measured tone.

He cites the audience of his last lecture as proof that it’s possible to share the emotional state of ‘now’. A moving permutation of listeners with car-crash nightmares, brilliant futures, painful losses and missing afterlives shared the space of his epiphany.

“In a public moment of discovery,” he says, “realisations can be accessed. Others in the room who process their own seismic changes may share my eureka at a later point. And when they remember back to this moment of clarity, they experience the same change. The same now.”

Mr Aristotle notes that change is critical to time, so ‘now’ could exist outside individual consciousness. The council chair asserts that Cangemi must provide some kind of further proof of the ‘common now’.

Luca Cangemi approaches the bench. His blue eyes display no emotion, but a whole world burns within them. “Look, and you will see my ‘now’.” He holds the gaze of the large ticking clock above the council bench. “You share in this epiphany. I am here by thought alone, outside the bounds of time, but inside the bounds of now.”

The absence of an application to appear before the council prior to Mr Cangemi’s visit confirms this as fact.

The greatest scientists in history peer deep into the man’s eyes. They see those in the lecture hall who realise their need to understand time’s questions and answers. They see the students’ past and future, their beauty and pain. They see Luca Cangemi, a father again, attempting to balance family and his career. They see his acceptance of his journey. The men see themselves amending the definition of ‘now’.

One by one, they corroborate the philosopher’s evidence and vote unanimously in favour of changing the law.

Cangemi holds the amendment in his hand. “‘Now,’” he says, “refers to an individual or shared conscious present moment, relative to those who think, believe, utter or write it.” This is the little piece of happiness he discovered in the empty space of a packed lecture theatre.

Immediately after he reads the definition, a kaleidoscope mixture of brilliant colour and vacuum black, of interstellar velocity and glacial change, transmits Luca Cangemi back to Humanities 1.

He sweeps the greying hair from his eyes and stares at the rows of empty seats. The clock reads nine-fifty-five. Time has transported him here, past everything else important in his life. Time has changed him, and he has changed it.

Luca Cangemi breathes in the car-fresh smell of the clean seats. He imagines the words of his new definition sailing out to waiting ears.

The doors open and the unsuspecting epiphanies rush in.

Time elapsed: now