Pub Theology 3/10/26 -- Tempus Fugit
We turned our clocks ahead this past weekend, bringing with it the unwelcome loss of an hour's sleep, time we won't get back again until the fall when we'll reset our clocks all over again. I don't know about you, but for me the extra daylight after the dinner hour doesn't compensate for the misery of waking up in pitch blackness as if we were still in the deepest depths of winter.
The twice-yearly ritual of resetting our clocks from standard time to daylight savings time and back again is a reminder that time is fleeting, or as the Roman poet and author Virgil put it, Tempus Fugit, literally time flies. Virgil's original version of this now common phrase emphasized the idea that time irretrievably escapes us. When it's gone, it's gone. This is very different than the line uttered by Matthew McConaughey's character Rust Cohle in the first season of HBO's series True Detective: "Tine is a flat circle."
If you're like me, you may have wondered where that phrase came from, and what it means. But thanks to the miracle of modern Internet sleuthing, we've got an answer. It's a reference to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence," In short, the idea that because time is endless, everything will eventually repeat itself. That includes your own life, which you will relive in exactly the same way, an infinite number of times, for all eternity. This may sound like a nightmare to you, but Nietzsche saw it as a cause for celebration, assuming you made your life into something you'd want to repeat an infinitely.
What this is all getting at is the topic we're going to talk about in our conversation this week -- our perception of and relationship with time. And we'll start simply, with daylight savings time, and dig deeper from there. Which do you subscribe to more, Virgil's idea of time as irretrievably escaping, or Rust Cohle's short-hand Nietzsche of time as eternally recurring? If you had one more hour in your day, 25 rather than 24, how would you use that extra time? What if you knew you could have one more day, or week, or month, or year of life than what you were expecting? What would you do with that? Would you live that bonus time any differently than your everyday?
Come spend some quality time with us this Tuesday, March 10, and join the conversation. Discussion starts tomorrow evening at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.
