Director's Notes – 156 – The Trouble with Time

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

The trouble with time is that it moves. The trouble with time is that we have to live in it. The trouble with time is that there’s never enough, but also the trouble with time is that it moves too slowly. The trouble with time is that we have too much on our hands and the trouble with time is that we’re wasting it.

Any of us living in the real world is familiar with these troubles with time. But Night Vale has had a different experience of time up until now. For them, time was something closer to voluntary. It was a force that you could choose to interact with or not, depending on how you were feeling. Some people aged normally for hundreds of years. Others stayed 19 forever.

But now time in Night Vale works the way it does anywhere else, and the repercussions of that needed to be addressed. Generally, when we consider time, we are ultimately considering aging and death. I went through a crisis about death when I turned 22 and got my first adult job and was hit with a stricken realization that I was going to die. Now Night Vale is all having that crisis together as a town. But there is hope. Maybe we can live forever as brains floating in tanks or as programs uploaded to computers. 

There are men (it is always men) in the real world right now trying to find the key to immortality. They are terrified of their own bodies, and of the end of them, and they want to find a way out. Of course, the key to immortality has been known for a long time. Night Vale addressed it some time ago when we said “death is only the end if you think the story is about you.” 

Our lives are only a part of a larger whole. The problem arises when we mistake our tiny selves for the vast sweep of it all.

My father was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition when he was in his late 40s. He was given about three years to live. He ended up living another seven. But still, we went through those years knowing that the end of his part of the story could come at any time. He used to say that he was ok with death, because if you wanted babies and children and new generations, then part of that was death. Life does not come without death. It is all part of a whole. To be afraid of death is to be afraid of everything.

Or maybe freezing your brain actually works. It seems to in Night Vale. In which case, sure, give that a shot. 

- Joseph Fink
October 15, 2019

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