Fear of Darkness: Part Two

This is a follow-up to Fear of Darkness: Part One

Alone in the dark, isolated from artificial distractions and desperate for sleep, two kinds of thoughts began plaguing me. First I had the commonplace nuisance thoughts that keep everyone awake occasionally: remember that embarrassing thing you did in fourth grade? Why did that strange woman look weirdly at you the other day? Here’s some song lyrics you haven’t bothered to remember in twenty years.

These thoughts passed quickly, though. Lingering on nuisance thoughts is the luxury of somebody secure in a warm bed, with rent paid and no fear of starvation. The minute conditions get cold, and you have legitimate reason to worry that you might lose all the financial security you’ve spent the last year struggling to recover, the internal monologue changes. You become aware that life really is precarious, even when you aren’t necessarily dying.

It began by remembering that Sarah expected me in Lawrence shortly before midnight. With no cell signal, I had no possibility of contacting her and explaining the situation. I couldn’t reassure her that I was essentially safe, despite the uncertainty now hanging around my head. Would she start worrying? Would she assume the worst and contact the police, fearing I was injured or dead?

(As it turned out, yes, that’s exactly what she did. Though I wouldn’t know that until the next afternoon.)

Something occurred to me: I was wondering what Sarah was doing right now. But does the concept of “right now” mean anything in these situations? Certainly, the world continues moving, and people continue living their lives, even when we cannot see one another. But when we speak of things happening simultaneously, it becomes very difficult to calibrate the movement of time. “Right now” is a very localized phenomenon.

Let me explain, as the thoughts came to me, late Friday night and into Saturday morning: I can say that “right now,” I am laying across the front seat of my pickup truck, using my duffel bag as a pillow, trying to find a comfortable position where the seat belt buckle doesn’t stab into my kidneys. I have the necessary information to know exact events happening within the range of my senses. But outside? Beyond the limits of my senses?

Another vehicle could be approaching beyond the next rise. Or it might not. That vehicle’s presence or absence means nothing until it’s confirmed—and it’ll only be confirmed when it actually crests the rise. I can only pinpoint another vehicle’s presence by working backward. Therefore, even though it definitely exists when I cannot see it, nevertheless I cannot describe its actions “right now” until it no longer is “right now.”

Therefore, while Sarah is definitely doing something “right now,” I cannot know what that is until much later. She exists, but that doesn’t mean anything. Two events, like me struggling to sleep and her contacting the Buffalo County Sheriff’s Department, only happen simultaneously later. Without information, I cannot possibly process two separate events together. “The Present” is circumscribed by my senses.

Saying two things happen simultaneously might make sense to an omniscient narrator in a novel, or a benevolent god watching from above. For everyone else, time is an illusion created by presence, or absense, of knowledge. As a technological society, we have constant streams of information available from satellites and LTE signals and fiber optic cables, but that information is always at least a few milliseconds old.

It always creates a gap between us and “right now.”

Trapped inside my broken-down truck in the winter countryside, in the dark, with no data signal and no other humans, my information field has collapsed. My immediate bubble is less than six feet wide, with some secondary data from outdoors, where I dare not actually venture because it’s cold. The constant, digitally streaming present with which Americans surround ourselves is, temporarily, lost to me.

“Right now,” my cats might be eating or sleeping or wrestling at home. Sarah might be worrying herself crazy, or she might’ve fallen asleep. Strangers might be falling in love or breaking up. Senior citizens are dying, taking a lifetime of stories with them, while babies are being born, commencing stories so vast, I’ll never comprehend them. I know so much is happening “right now.”

Yet even as “right now” exists, it simultaneously doesn’t, until we communicate it with one another. Each of us remains trapped inside our bubble of unknowing, inside our own private broken-down Silverado, isolated and lonely. That’s what it means to be truly in the dark.

See also: Fear of Darkness: Part Three