Dateline: Bali

In the good old days, when you knew where you were, newspapers were real newspapers.  Typesetting was in hot metal, the journalists wore green eye shades and news stories had datelines.  Found at the top of each piece they gave the date and the place the story was filed.  Their role was to remind the reader that communications being problematic from some of the further-flung corners of the world, the stories might have taken a day two to reach the editorial offices, and might therefore refer to the more distant past.  The dateline gave the exact day when the story was written.

Today, of course, with instant, global contact, the date in the dateline is superfluous: all the news is the latest.  So the dateline has shrunk to just a record of the news’s place of origin.

As it happens, this confusion of time and space has been increasingly sanctioned by some of the most advanced theories of science.  For example, one of the central ideas of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is that concepts of time and simultaneity are dependent on where you are: they do not exist universally, but can change.

In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein went even further, dissolving the neat distinction between time and space altogether by introducing instead the continuum of space-time, curvatures of which give rise to apparent gravitational forces – the idea at the heart of his theory.  This has opened up the possibility of all sorts of madnesses. For example, according to theories concerning black holes – unimaginably dense collapsed stars – in some circumstances it is possible to circle one and not move in space, but in a closed loop of time.

It was thoughts such as these that happened to pass through my mind one cloudless night in the early summer of 1988.  I was on the east coast of Bali, walking up and down the long sandy beach of Sanur.  What made me ponder on these mysteries that evening?  Perhaps it was the soft thrumming of one of the local gamelan bands behind me as it provided its after-dinner entertainment to the sparse guests, with its magical, subtly shifting repetitions which seemed to hover in the air, almost outside time.  Perhaps, as I gazed out across the moon-shimmered sea to the eastern horizon, it was the thought of the International Dateline out there – admittedly another five thousand miles or so.

Certainly the Dateline and its relation to time had obsessed me for years – if only because I had signally failed to grasp its concept.  Of course I knew that it was bound up with the fact that the Earth was a sphere, and so in passing round it there had to be a point at which the local hour fell back by a day – otherwise you would end up with two dates at the same location – clearly ridiculous, even in an Einsteinian world.  But I was unable to put together the different elements of time and space that caused this to happen.  Then suddenly, under that silver moon, serenaded by the distant gamelan, I had it: I understood completely how the Dateline worked, and why it was necessary.  Unfortunately, as this particular point in time I am not able to explain this insight clearly to anyone now.  You probably had to be there.

(28.12.91)

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