Bruce, Bruckner, and Einstein Stop Time

Our subjects are from the same planet but different worlds.

• Bruce Springsteen - "The Boss" of New Jersey, a legendary god of Rock and Roll
• Anton Bruckner - 19th Century composer who wrote beautiful yet tragic music until the day he died
• Albert Einstein - Physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect and developed the math behind large and small mass physics.

What do these three men of differing backgrounds have in common? It is their ability to stop time dead where it stands.

Einstein's ability to stop time is least surprising. After all, physicists can do anything, right? Einstein proposed that when approaching a mass density of near infinite proportions, the space/time continuum would warp, slowing time until the inevitable moment it stopped altogether. Although Einstein never quite managed to perform this feat in time to forestall his own death, his discovery still influences physics today.

Bruce Springsteen and Anton Bruckner are far more curious cases. How do a rock musician with terrible pitch and a depressed, dying composer manage to stop freeze time? The answer takes us back to the first week of class.

Kairos.

It's that indescribable sensation that the world has dropped away entirely for that moment. Although a watch could measure the phenomenon in hours and minutes, you know it lasted far longer than that.

Last Tuesday (16 Nov), "The Boss" stopped by Jimmy Fallon's late night show and performed two songs. As he does frequently in his arena shows, Springsteen went over his allotted time. "?uestlove", Fallon's drummer said of the experience,

"If you look at the last 20 seconds [of "Because the Night"], all of us are literally in a circle. It's like no one else is in that room except Little Steven, the Professor, Bruce, and all seven of my guys," says ?uestlove. "We're totally disregarding the minute mark and the deadline. I'm surprised they got it all on there 'cause Lord knows we went 32 bars over." [courtesy of Rolling Stone]

Two days later (18 Nov), the Utah Symphony Orchestra stopped by BYU, performing Anton Bruckner's final symphony, the famous No. 9. As the final notes faded away, the conductor left his baton in the air long after the end of the song. As it dropped to his side, complete silence filled the hall. For fifteen seconds, the crowd struggled to break the musical hypnosis.

Finally, the first pair of hands began to clap and slowly the rest of the room joined in. According to the program, Symphony No. 9 runs just under an hour, but everybody in the room knew differently. Decades of anguish and joy, disappointment and triumph had been poured into Bruckner's final work, written as his mind and body broke down. No, that one hour had lasted far longer than sixty mere minutes.

A good life should never be measured in years and months. It's true, we only live for so long, but it's what we do with our time that makes us who we are.

Don't ever let time get in your way. It is, after all, only here for a moment.