Portillon automatique
by Bob on July 17, 2007
When I lived in Paris, France in the early 1970s, I learned a great deal about many things: food, different manners, love, poetry, music, and portillions. That's right. Portillons.
Some subway stations, called in Paris "Metro" stations, had an automatic gate right at the entrance to the platform of the station. It closed slowly as the train approached the station. The idea was to restrict the flow of people trying to get on after the train had come into the station, so the train could reasonably take on new passengers and discharge the ones on it. But if you were behind the portillon (actually, "portillon automatique" since it was mechanically triggered and not by a human operator) you had to wait for the next train when it came. That was just life in Paris ! And if you tried to squeeze through the closing portillion, well you were in trouble. You would get squished but not crushed or injured. And you could not catch the train you had hoped to catch ! I got embarrassingly stuck in it once trying to catch the train since I was a bona fide New Yorker where we ran for trains and had no such devices on our platforms.
So there was a polite way in Paris of ensuring passenger flow and letting the Metro subway train get out of the station in a reasonable time without people trying to jump over hoops to squeeze into the train. One must after all be civilised in Paris, and also have patience. Life is short, so we were supposed to reduce stress in our lives.
But this portillon is a great metaphor and lesson in life.
Things end. There is a definitive moment. There is a decision made. There is a wall through which we are not supposed to penetrate. There is a moment clearly defined. You can't go through the gate, so let it be. It is precise and clearly defined.
Philosophers and wise men have had a hard struggle defining a "moment" in time, or even time itself. The portillon had no such trouble. But some philosophers did. For to define a moment, in the larger picturem is nearly impossible. For as we pin it down as a moment, it has already slipped out of our hands into the past. That's, of course, if we metaphysically honestly believe in the concepts of past, present, and future, for that is a rubbery definition say the sages. Jung wrote on that. Lewis Carroll certainly challenged it when he had the White Queen say to Alice that it's a poor sort of memory which only works backwards. Yogi Berra the baseball player knew when he said it was deja vu all over again. And Nietzsche knew when he wrote the riddle of the dwarf in his "Thus Spake Zarathustra" that a moment is a virtual impossibly hard paradox (cf. chapter XLVI: "The Vision and the Enigma") .
But physicists and scientists need to define a moment conveniently for the equations to work, even moments in mathematics, and their model of the "world" to be consistent. But that's a compromise, and Einstein knew that. It's only a model, after all.
Society needs to define it, like in the Paris Metro with the portillon, for if time were not thought to be linear, we would all likely cease to be productive, whatever that really means. And "Distance = Rate x Time" is a must -- to plan a trip or get somewhere on time and to predict how long things will take.
The down-side of this is that we have the temptation to make everything and even people like pieces in a gigantic machine. Like a big assembly line of life. That's a slippery slope in the long run.
Sweden once changed the way it made its automobiles from a factory assembly line to meany cohesive "teams" of employees working to assemble and build one car at a time. This turned out to produce better cars. But it didn't produce as many. That is the temptation: quantity over quality.
So we learn an important lesson from a gate. It closes and it defines a boundary. Janus, the ancient Roman god, was the god of new beginnings and endings, and thence became the god of doors. We get the English word "janitor" from that. Also the month of "January", the beginning of the year.
A moment is quite useful -- be it a romatic moment or subway train moment. As long as we know there is a slight illusion going on which we accept as part of the Social Contract.
One recalls the great and powerful song by The Doors (oddly enough named for our discussion), called "The End". Jim Morrison knew all about moments.
And one of the most practical applications of this all is when we must prudently define an end to something. I was once told it is critical to know when to leave or get out, and onto the next thing. Life has shown that is so very true.