But that’s a piece of shop-boy wisdom. I’m sure it’s not what what’shis-name—Einstein—had in mind. If that was his discovery, he wouldn’t be so famous. He must have been interested in something else, something to do with mathematics, which I know nothing about. But someone just as smart could have come along sometime and realized something else, namely, the way time suddenly shifts. What I mean is the way the quality of time, an era’s sense of life shifts. All of a sudden everybody experiences time differently than they did yesterday or the day before. You can’t tell exactly why it is: historical events, like maybe wars, revolutions? They didn’t touch it off, didn’t cause it. Not at all: they’re just the products of the shift. They never could have happened without that abrupt, mysterious change. Today’s experts are utterly nonplussed by it. Even the theologians can’t think of anything to say about it, for instance, that God must be in a bad mood or that He just inhaled and then exhaled. It’s something worth studying: what makes two eras different from each other? Do they return in some guise or other? Are their fundamental principles transformed into their opposites? At any rate, you can’t ignore it. Everyone’s felt how the world can change from one day to the next. The difficulty is that you don’t notice it right away. It takes a while to realize that since such-and-such a day, everything is different . . .”

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