the philosophy of solvej balle

can time freeze? can love be forever?

The best three novels I read in 2025 were the first three novels of Solvej Balle’s seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume series. I read these three novels straight-through, the day I got hold of each of them, experiencing little desire to do anything else. The English translation of the fourth is out in April, and I can’t wait.

If you don’t know anything about these books, then the easiest starting point is to think of them as ‘Groundhog Day’ novels. This is because, as with that movie, the Balle books feature a main character whose day begins over and over again — although, as I’ll discuss below, there are better ways to describe what this character experiences, time-wise. A sign of Balle’s greatness, however, is how completely she manages to revivify what seemed like an exhausted idea: “Groundhog Day? Uh huh, I saw that years ago. I guess it was kinda funny. But you want me to read seven novels on the same theme?” Yes. Yes times seven!

There are many reasons you should try these novels, from the tightness of Balle’s prose, to the illuminating yet non-didactic way she engages with important ‘human’ concerns like love, friendship, and the demands of morality. I’ll return to some of those concerns at the end of this piece. But my favourite thing about the Balle books is their interaction with the philosophy of time. So I’ll mostly focus on that.

I should tell you at this point that, beyond revealing some basic facts you would learn by reading the opening pages of the first Balle book, I’m only going to include one serious spoiler in my discussion of Balle Time — a piece of information that’s important for my discussion, but which you wouldn’t learn from the novels until the end of Volume III. So if you want to be surprised by the way Balle interacts with philosophical questions about time, then you should stop now and read the books!

What’s going on time-wise in Balle World?

The first thing to note about Balle World is that many of its inhabitants are living in a ‘repeating’ day. By the end of Volume III, we don’t know how many of these ‘repeater’ people there are, but let’s say there are several billion. For all of these people, every day is November 18th. What I mean by this is that each of The Several Billion wakes up every morning where they woke up on the ‘first’ November 18th,¹ with no memories beyond the night of November 17th — a day which, as far as we know, was totally ordinary, time-wise at least.

When thinking about The Several Billion, therefore, you might focus on how none of them is concerned that the morning newspaper is now always dated November 18th, and that its content is always the same.² It’s not just that The Several Billion have forgotten that November 18th has already passed, however. They also don’t age in a normal manner. Their hair doesn’t grow from day to day, for instance, just as their memories don’t persist. Rather, the minds and the bodies of The Several Billion ‘reset’, every night.

Let’s now turn to a second set of Balle World inhabitants. The members of this second set ‘live outside’ of the ‘repeating’ day. I’ll explain what I mean by this in a moment, but the serious spoiler I’m going to give you is that, by the end of Volume III, we know that there are at least nine of these people for whom the day doesn’t ‘reset’ and ‘repeat’. What I mean by this is that if three days had passed since November 17th, then The Nine would be aware that three days had passed. And it’s not just that this set of people can retain memories beyond ‘each’ November 18th — their hair grows normally, too.

Unlike The Several Billion, therefore, The Nine are (unsurprisingly!) extremely concerned that, no matter how many days have passed since November 17th, the morning newspaper is now always dated November 18th, and its content is always the same. There are many other things The Nine find concerning, too. If, for instance, one of them were to fall asleep in Grand Central Station on the night of any particular November 18th, then the next morning they would see the exact same members of The Several Billion who were in Grand Central Station on the morning of first November 18th, and those members of The Several Billion would be doing the exact same things they were doing that day!³

So, The Nine aren’t affected by the ‘repeating’ in themselves, either physically or mentally. But they are definitely aware that the ‘repeating’ is happening to people around them — as well as to other physical things. When each new November 18th begins, that is, the shelves of the shops become restocked with the items that had been bought the previous November 18th!⁴ And if someone had forgotten to put a household item back in its place during one of these ‘repeater’ days, then there it would be the next morning, as if it had never been moved. Okay, some objects in Balle World do fail to ‘reset’ in this way — I’ll return to this below — but most of them do. And The Nine are very aware of this.

A key distinction between The Nine and The Several Billion, therefore, is that The Nine are able to count the ‘repeating’ days as different days. Whereas The Several Billion cannot do this because, as above, everything ‘resets’ for them, every single night. It’s important to note, however, that this means that The Several Billion do nonetheless continue to exist across The Nine’s more fully passing time. Otherwise, what would it mean to say that everything ‘resets’ for them, ‘every single night’? It’s not as if The Several Billion are totally frozen in time, therefore, or as if time has stopped for them. It’s more that the passing days have no physical or mental effect on The Several Billion, outside of the temporal extent of each day.

By now, you probably have some pretty big questions about what’s going on in the Balle books, time-wise. I’m going to focus on the following three. First, is time ‘messed up’ for The Nine or for The Several Billion? Second, what are the classic philosophical debates about time that Balle is engaging with in these novels, explicitly or implicitly? And third, why is the Balle series called On the Calculation of Volume, when the books are surely about time rather than space?

Is time ‘messed up’ for The Nine or The Several Billion?

A funny thing about these books is that Balle is constantly trying to get us to think that ‘the bad thing’, time-wise, is happening to The Nine. Tara Selter, who narrates the novels through a series of diary entries, is one of The Nine. And, from the start of Volume I, Balle pushes us to focus on Tara’s distress at finding herself suddenly experiencing the world differently from everyone else around her — and, in particular, at having been divided in this way from her husband, Thomas, who is one of The Several Billion.

Yet, as soon as we come to realise that Tara isn’t the only person who differs from the norm — when we meet some other members of The Nine, that is — it seems to me especially clear that the people we should be the most worried about are The Several Billion. Indeed, it’s them we should’ve been the most worried about from the start of the Balle books! They are the ones who cannot ‘move on’ from day to day. They are the ones who cannot remember the days that pass.

This is why I said there’s a better way to describe what’s happening to the main character of these novels than describing her as someone whose ‘day begins over and over again’ — that description should surely be reserved for the members of The Several Billion! What’s more, if everyone in Balle World were like Tara, then wouldn’t day-dating have continued as normal, from the off? I mean, if everyone were like Tara, wouldn’t the ‘second’ November 18th have been collectively referred to ‘November 19th’? Indeed, we might well assume that the reason the morning newspaper is now always dated November 18th is simply that the people who write the morning newspaper are members of The Several Billion who cannot remember that November 18th has already passed!

Okay okay, we know that the ‘repeating’ problem goes much deeper than the malfunctioning memories of The Several Billion. But if the memories of the newspaper writers were working normally, then wouldn’t they have continued to date the newspapers normally, regardless of any weird physical ‘resets’ that were happening to their bodies and the objects around them? Sure, the weather and the seasons also ‘reset’ in Balle World. And we can assume that the same thing happens to all clocks and computers. But none of this should be enough, in itself, to persuade anyone that the days have stopped passing! I mean, just because your clock says it’s yesterday, and just because it’s raining at the exact ‘same’ minute that it did yesterday, doesn’t mean you’re going to accept that today is indeed yesterday! And before you suggest it, why would this happening lots of times in a row make such a thing more — rather than less — likely?

The memory malfunction of The Several Billion is very important to the framing of these books as ‘Groundhog Day’ novels, therefore. At the extreme, this is because without the collective memory malfunction storyline it seems as if the weirdness of Balle World would hinge on physical regeneration rather than time repetition. This could be one route into thinking about why the series’ title focuses on space over time! More straightforwardly, however, if we conceive of The Several Billion as suffering from some kind of collective amnesia, then this can help us get a grip on the way in which time surely does continue to ‘tick on’ in Balle World — even though many of its inhabitants have weirdly limited awareness of this, and even though many other weird things are happening, too.

The most concerning personal problem each member of The Several Billion is facing, however, is neither a malfunctioning memory nor a regenerating body. Rather, it’s that they’re unable to do anything but the same things, in the same way, every single day. Okay, sure, when they interact with members of The Nine, then members of The Several Billion can indeed break out of the ‘patterns’ they’ve become trapped in — at least until they awake the following morning. Tara can prevent Thomas from going out of the house at the same time he ‘usually’ does, for instance, if she delays him on some particular November 18th. And she changes his patterns every time she speaks with him: he can say new things to her, in such circumstances. But aside from these temporary pattern changes caused by interactions with The Nine, The Several Billion seem to be subjects of some kind of determinism.

After all, if you weren’t subject to something like determinism, then why should failing to remember what you’d done the first time you did whatever you did in some particular scenario entail that you’d do exactly the same thing whenever you found yourself in that same scenario again? This leaves me wondering whether the most significant distinction between The Nine and The Several Billion is not that the latter are stuck in a ‘repeating’ day, but rather that, without external stimulus, they cannot exercise their capacity for free agency. If this is true, then the repetitious dating of the newspaper goes far beyond a matter of memory malfunction!

What are the philosophical debates about time that Balle is engaging with?

I’ll now turn to considering Balle Time within the context of two classic philosophical debates about time.⁵ First, is time ‘independent’ in Balle World? Second, how does Balle Time relate to John McTaggart’s A series and B series?

1) Is time ‘independent’ in Balle World?

I’ve assumed since Volume I that the Balle books are, on some level, a comment on what’s sometimes referred to as ‘the container theory of time’. I’ll discuss this theory below, but mentions of the word ‘container’ grow throughout the series. If the Kindle app search function is correct, then the word appears zero times in Volume I, seven times in Volume II, and fifteen in Volume III. Some of the early mentions aren’t made in relation to time at all, but here’s a particularly clear example from Volume II:

“When I sit in my backyard I can tell that my time is a container. That is how it is. It is a day one can step into. Again and again. Not a stream which one can only dip into once. Time doesn’t fly anywhere, it stays still, it is a vessel. Every day I lower my body into the eighteenth of November. I move around but nothing runs over the edge. Time is a space. Time is a room. Time is my backyard in afternoon sunshine, with the sound of cars, with trams in the distance. My day is a container filled with a mild breeze and sunshine every day around three. The night is a container with a medlar tree that rustles in the breeze, and the night says danke when the fruit falls.” (p.145)

By Volume III, Tara refers repeatedly to time itself as a container. And here she is narrating a disagreement she has with a fellow member of The Nine, on the topic:

“We’re a strange bunch inside a container of time.

If time is a container, that is, says Henry.

He thinks it’s more like a train, and we are all seated in the same compartment. As if we are on a journey.” (p.169).⁶

Okay, I’ll admit upfront that Tara’s references to time as a container often don’t match the way in which time is treated as a container with the container theory of time. But I don’t think this matters much for my view that Balle is interacting with the theory. After all, the novels of novelists can be about different things from the things their characters tell us! So perhaps Tara’s words serve as a signal rather than an explanation. But even if Balle isn’t commenting on any particular philosophical theory of time in these novels, thinking about how time ‘works’ in the world she has created can nonetheless be useful for thinking about the strength of that theory. In this context, I’ll give you a quick explainer of the container theory of time, before getting into what I think Balle might be saying about it.

The container theory of time is a theory within a philosophical debate about the relation between time and change. There are two big standard philosophical theories in this debate. First, some people think that time is independent from change. On this view, time can be thought of as a container. That is, people who hold this view tell us that even if events stopped unfolding — if, instead, somehow everything in the world ‘froze’ — then time would nonetheless continue. The container wouldn’t go away! It could have frozen contents, and it could have no contents, and it would nonetheless persist. This view is called substantivalism, because its proponents typically think of time as a substance.⁷ Isaac Newton was one of them.

Some other people think, however, that there cannot be time without change. On this second view, if the kind of ‘freeze’ took place that meant events stopped unfolding, then time would also be frozen.⁸ This view is called relationism, because on this view, time is reduced to relations between events, or between things and events. So on this view, there is no container. There are just the things that, on the container view, are the container’s contents! Leibniz held this view.⁹

Putting all this in the context of Balle World, we can return to my claim above that The Several Billion surely continue to exist across The Nine’s more fully passing time. Otherwise, again, what would it mean to say that everything ‘reset’ for The Several Billion, ‘every single night’? Another way of looking at this is to accept that time ‘continues’ in Balle World, even though some of its people and things are subject to an odd kind of ‘freezing’, in the form of the ‘repeating’ day. This interpretation of what’s going on in the books reflects the position of the container theory of time.

Perhaps, however, we can also see the second view at work in Balle World. Remember, this view is the relationist view, and it says that time is just change: that if events stopped unfolding, then time would stop. In this context, you could see The Several Billion as helping to show us that time can, in some sense, stop — after all, they don’t age beyond each day! But then, what about The Nine? Wouldn’t they still show that time passes ‘normally’ in Balle World, because the Several Billion’s lives can be tracked against The Nine’s, regardless of any ‘stopping’?

A third option arises here. Perhaps we could see the novels as a comment on the (most extreme!) quantum theories of time that allow time to pass differently in different parts of the universe, and also allow for time to move beyond linearity. Maybe this could explain the way that the day ‘repeats’ for the Several Billion — the way in which time seems to ‘go back’! Regardless, a question would still remain about whether this ‘weird’ time could be tracked against ‘normal’ time, or whether there could be a bigger time ‘container’ in which these two differently passing times existed.

2) What about the A series and the B series?

Next, let’s briefly consider Balle World in the context of John McTaggart’s famous ‘A series and B series’ framing.¹⁰ These two series offer us different ways of thinking about when events happen. McTaggart picks holes in both series, but many philosophers identify as either A or B! If you’re an A series person, then you think of events as happening in the past, or the present, or the future. Whereas, if you’re a B series person, you think of events as happening in relation to one another — in the sense, for instance, that some particular event happened “earlier than” some other event, but “later than” another one.

One thing to note about this second view, therefore, is that these “earlier than” and “later than” kinds of relations always hold. That is, no matter what else is going on, and no matter what time it is, Julius Caesar was always killed earlier than Franz Ferdinand was killed. Events on the B series have a fixedness, therefore. Whereas, when you think about events in the context of the A series, they have a non-fixedness. That is, the killing of Julius Caesar switched from being in the future to being in the present, and it also switched from being in the present to being in the past.

Here’s McTaggart’s own explanation of all this:

“Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past.”

Many questions arise about these framings, not least: how long does the present last? But if we take the two series on the simple terms above, then how might they relate to Balle World?

Well, on the A series view, events have the non-fixedness that comes from switching from being in the future to being in the present, and then from being in the present to being in the past. But in Balle World, events can switch in some further ways — from being in the past to being in the present, for instance! Or at least, they can if we take what’s happening in Balle World at face value, and accept that every time Thomas walks through the rainstorm on the ‘repeating’ afternoon of November 18th, it is the ‘same event’. (As you might have guessed from reading this piece so far, I don’t like thinking about these events as the ‘same event’, but I’ll put my objections to one side!) If we take Balle world events at face value in this way, therefore, then we can think of them as having an extra kind of non-fixedness — a non-fixedness on which past is not always “earlier than” the present!

In that context, let’s now turn to the B series view. On this view, events have the fixedness of happening “earlier than” and “later than”. But in Balle World, such things are not fixed in that way because something can happen both “earlier than” and “later than”! What I mean by this is that: 1) when Tara learns that Henry is a fellow member of The Nine, it is “earlier than” Thomas goes to bed on November 18th, because Tara learns this about Henry in the afternoon of one particular November 18th; but also 2) when Tara learns that Henry is a fellow member of The Nine, it is “later than” Thomas goes to bed on November 18th, because Thomas has already gone to bed on the previous November 18th! Again, this only works if we take what is happening at face value, in the sense above. And then, it is complicated here by the fact that we are depending on multiple November 18ths in a way in which we weren’t above.

Nonetheless, I think we could interpret Balle as trying to invent a world that addresses some of the problems of relations within and between the two time series that have interested philosophers for decades. McTaggart’s own arguments, for instance, would play out very differently in a world in which the present could be at the same time as the past!¹¹

Why is the series called On the Calculation of Volume?

Philosophers often make analogies between time and space. One reason for this is that most people find it far easier to get a grasp on space, than time, as a concept. There are various neat analogies with space, therefore, that are often used to help explain complex ideas from the philosophy of time. Here’s Katherine Hawley, for instance, introducing perdurantism by telling us that:

“Some philosophers believe that you take up time by having different temporal parts at different times. Your spatial parts are things like your head, your feet and your nose; your temporal parts are things like you-yesterday, you-today and you-tomorrow. If you have different temporal parts, this would explain how you can exist at different times, and it would also explain how you can have different properties at different times (you-yesterday hasn’t heard of temporal parts, you-tomorrow is an expert). According to these philosophers, then, persisting through time is pretty much like extending through space: it’s all a matter of parts.”

Another reason that space analogies can help us to deal with the complexity of the philosophy of time is that most of us intuitively accept that space is an independent objective thing. Nonetheless, as you might guess, there is a relationist view about space, which mirrors the relationist view about time! So, as above, the relationist view about time holds that if there were no events, then time would no longer exist. Similarly, the relationist view about space holds that if there were no objects, then space would no longer exist! This, I think, could be another route into understanding the titles of the Balle books.

Remember I mentioned that sometimes objects in Balle World don’t ‘reset’ over night? Well, I’m going to give you another spoiler now and reveal that, while by the end of Volume III we don’t know why or fully when this happens, it always seems to involve interaction between these objects and members of The Nine. Tara, for instance, becomes worried on realising that, at least sometimes, the things she consumes do not ‘reset’. The cakes she buys do not return to the shelves of the shop, and she begins to see herself as some kind of consumption monster! Another way of putting this is to say that Tara realises that what she does in ‘her time’ can affect — and even destroy — objects in the ‘time of The Several Billion’.

Now if, in this context, the time of The Several Billion were the time that ‘mattered’ in terms of the relevance of objects to space, then couldn’t it be that if The Nine destroyed all the objects in ‘their time’, then space would no longer exist? That would be a pretty good reason for focusing on volume over time in the titles of these novels! And if of course it were, instead, the time of The Nine that ‘mattered’ in this sense, then The Nine had better start being productive! Either way, if this ‘consumption monster’ concern were to become a central theme of the Balle books, they could then be interpreted as a comment not on the independence of time, but on the independence of space.

Some more ‘human’ questions

I’ll finish by raising five questions about the implications of all this philosophy of time complexity for some more ‘human’ concerns: death, obligation, the independence of the self, love, and fertility. There’ll be a few more spoilers here, so think hard before carrying on!

If a character died, might they switch group?

At some point in the coming four novels, I assume that one of the main characters will die. This seems likely because, within Balle World, there’s a pressing unvoiced question about whether someone could escape the ‘repeating’ day by dying. By the end of Volume III, we know that members of The Several Billion can indeed die, because some of The Nine spend time trying to prevent these deaths. We haven’t as yet been afforded narrative access to anyone who has ‘come back from the dead’, but we know that members of The Several Billion who died on the first November 18th go on to die ‘repeatedly’ without such intervention, and it’s also been implied that they continue to do so afterwards.

If one of The Nine were to die, however, I wonder whether they might become one of The Several Billion. If so, the Balle books could be interpreted as advancing a theory about death, or as describing the fallout of a catastrophic event. That is, rather than suffering from some kind of collective amnesia, perhaps The Several Billion died during some catastrophe, and their state of temporal entrapment represents what it is to be dead? Or perhaps it is The Nine who are dead, and they have found themselves having gained the heavenly quality of free will! Regardless, the bodily death of one of The Nine is something to watch out for. It could also help us to think about mental persistence within the context of the independence of time debate.

Will Balle switch to moral theory?

There were some signs in Volume III that the Balle books might turn out to be a more of comment on morality than metaphysics. This can be seen, in particular, in the disagreement that arises between two members of The Nine about how they should use their ‘advance knowledge’ about what will happen to The Several Billion each day. Here, in moral philosophy terms, a line is drawn between an approach on which the reduction of aggregate suffering is what matters, and one on which the ‘separateness of persons’ overrides.

My guess, however, is that the flaws of consequentialist reasoning will be a focus only for Volume III. This is because one of the most delightful things about these books is the way in which Balle comes up with unexpected focuses for each. Here’s a semi-spoiler, but I struggle to think of any feature of any twenty-first art object that has pleased me more than Volume II’s interaction with the seasons.

Are these novels telling us something about the independence of the self?

It’s become increasingly fashionable to undermine the moral and even metaphysical significance of the self. Many contemporary art objects — and of course pieces of political commentary — trade on the idea that it’s not just that individuals depend on community, but that the self is an ephemeral thing with porous edges. Within philosophical writing, I see this even in libertarian circles!

It’s interesting to me, therefore, that the Balle books, by contrast, depend on a really strong sense of self across time — on the idea, that is, of each ‘normal’ person having their own discrete and steady internal world. Tara exemplifies this. She is presented as deeply normal in a way that has been lost to Thomas, now he’s stuck within deterministic repetition. In the wake of this loss to Thomas, Tara realises that she herself has become her only dependable companion.

Outside of complex philosophy, I find it hard to understand why the discreteness and steadiness of the self isn’t the status quo within general discussion about the human condition. I mean, the self is how we each are in the world! It is through having a self, and only through having a self, that we can experience anything. I can no sooner exist and have experiences ‘outside of’ having my own self, than I can ‘inside of’ someone else’s. And the communities we each depend upon are groupings of these separate selves, not blurs. What would it even mean for our selves to blur together? How could such things combine? How could we share a self? If I know anything, then I know that I have a discrete and steady self!¹² It’s refreshing to see this so confidently reflected within art.

Is Balle making a point about the conditionality of love?

While I was reading Volume I, I thought a lot about the relationship between Tara and Thomas. Tara and Thomas are presented as having been an extremely happy couple before the ‘repeating’ began, yet relatively quickly their closeness dissolves. I was confused that Tara wasn’t choosing to spend more of her days with Thomas, when she was presented as loving him so much.

Okay, Thomas doesn’t know that Tara is choosing to be apart from him, but that doesn’t reduce the moral significance of what she’s doing. Rather, it adds an extra layer. As I discussed with Henry Oliver on his excellent The Common Reader podcast, a useful analogy here is the way in which just because your granny who has Alzheimer’s doesn’t know that it’s been a year since she last saw you, this doesn’t make it okay that you visit so rarely. You know it’s been that long! You know that she experiences the time passing without you! As with Thomas, this remains the case regardless of the fact that she isn’t able to add the days together and understand how long it has been, cumulatively.

In this context, I came to think that another theme of the Balle books is the conditional nature of love. What I mean by this is that sometimes it’s impossible for love to persist when the conditions in which it arose undergo serious change. Balle shows us, in particular, the risks that arise when people who love each other come to have some significant point of difference in their experiencing of the world. The differences between how Tara and Thomas experience the passing of time are extreme differences.

While I was reading Volume III, I wondered whether Balle might, therefore, be making a comment about the different ways in which autistic people and non-autistic people experience the world. On a superficial level, I thought this because Tara and many of The Nine display traits that are often strongly associated with being autistic. But I also thought it because Tara and Thomas suffer a fundamental disjunction of communication. This disjunction doesn’t derive from either of them lacking the capacity to communicate, but rather because the things they need and want to communicate don’t quite overlap. I think Balle is telling us here that the gaps that arise in such situations — as small as these gaps each might be — can compound. They can compound, as in the case of Tara and Thomas, to the point of relationship failure. I continue to think that Balle is telling us this even though, on reflection, I’m unconvinced that she’s making any comment about autism.

Rather, I think the thing to focus on is that Balle has given us a couple who seem to be perfectly suited. They run a business together, neatly complementing each other’s skills. They are sweet as well as passionate with each other. They have built a stylish home that reflects each of them, as well as their pairing. But so quickly, the solidity of their partnership falls apart, with Tara becoming not only unable to communicate convincingly with Thomas, but also quite quickly — in the context of their supposedly perfect relationship — seemingly being unable to bring herself to keep trying. Are we to take from this that their perfect match was made on superficial grounds? That there are some kinds of similarity that are more important than others, to this end?

I think we should focus less on the idea that the Tara-Thomas relation has certain inherent qualities, and more on the relevance of the actions of Tara — the only member of the couple who can instigate new shared experiences for them. I think that Tara behaves badly towards Thomas by acting as if his interests don’t matter so much, now he is stuck in the ‘repeating’ day. But I also think that Tara’s actions remind us how beautiful it is that romantic love is not unconditional — that, instead, it requires persistent intentional choice. Love of this kind can only be experienced between free agents, and sadly, Thomas may no longer qualify as such.

What about fertility?

The final comment I want to make is that Balle is writing these novels during a moment in which a time-related challenge is the near the top of the world’s concerns. We aren’t told Tara’s age, or whether she and Thomas have ever wanted to be parents. But one of the reasons surely that many women have such anxiety about fertility is that fertility is one of the few entirely time-constrained options that any humans ever face.

What I mean by this is that most of the progress we make in our lives — passing exams, getting jobs, holding certain positions, obtaining things that fulfil us — aren’t tied to being at any particular stage of life. Of course, social norms do direct that this is often the case! But throughout the passing of our lives, it’s only certain rare biological matters, like puberty and menopause, that are strictly tied to certain ages. It seems unsurprising to me that this rare fixedness poses deep anxiety for creatures with free will!

I’m not suggesting that the Balle books are about the fertility crisis. That, for instance, their time-related ‘rule-breaking’ can be read as a comment on the way in which modern science is on the verge of freeing us from the time-constrained events that have throughout human history been correctly conceived as both natural and inevitable. These novels do, however, force us to focus on the constraints of time. Balle reminds us that, even though we live with the freedom of The Nine, we live — as yet — within a box.

1. As per footnote 3, whether The Several Billion can wake up in other places hasn’t yet been fully tested, but you can assume that they can’t for the purposes of this exegesis.

2. This is just a clarifying example I’ve come up with, although a ‘repeating’ episode involving a newspaper is used early on in the novels to help us to understand Balle Time.

3. I think I’m right in claiming that, by the end of the third novel, it hasn’t been fully tested whether members of The Nine can ‘get’ members of The Several Billion to wake up in different places. For instance, I think that Tara didn’t try hard enough at this with Thomas!

4. There is of course an interesting philosophical question about whether these are the same things! Also, I’ll discuss below the way in which some of the shelves do not restock.

5. I wrote a draft section of this piece in which I discussed Balle World in relation to the philosophical debate about which ‘stages’ of time — past, present, and future — exist. But I decided not to include it because my piece was getting long, and the points I was making in that section were quite peripheral to my main arguments. There’s very interesting stuff to be said about this, though!

6. I’ve spatially separated out the sentences here to make what’s going on clearer to readers who aren’t used to Balle’s stream-of-consciousness style. In the book, this bit reads without para breaks between sentences: “We’re a strange bunch inside a container of time. If time is a container, that is, says Henry. He thinks it’s more like a train, and we are all seated in the same compartment. As if we are on a journey.”

7. Substance is a funny word in philosophy: it isn’t only used to refer to solid things.

8. Talk of ‘freezing’ is standard in discussion of these things, but it might, in particular, make you think of Sydney Shoemaker’s wonderful paper Time Without Change (1969). I did think about including a section in this piece where I talked about Balle World in relation to the imaginary world that Shoemaker describes in his paper (a world of local time freezes and possible general time freezes). But, again, my piece was already getting long, and the points I wanted to make were quite peripheral to my main arguments. Again, there’s much interesting stuff to be said, however! I will likely write about the Shoemaker article in my next ‘5 Top Things’ piece.

9. There are many complex versions of each of these theories! Here, I’ve just produced a simple version of each, so that people who don’t know anything about this great philosophical debate can get into it a little, while I have fun expounding on Balle Time.

10. The Unreality of Time, 1908.

11. Again, I could, and almost did write a long section about the interrelations between Balle World and McTaggart World. I will likely write about the McTaggart article in my next ‘5 Top Things’ piece.

12. If I had more time here, I would emphasise that the discreteness clearly doesn’t depend on the steadiness. And of course it’s less easy to argue for the steadiness than it is to argue for the discreteness! For more on tensions about the steadiness of self, you can see some of my (!) recent (!) thoughts about relevant writing by Bertrand Russell and Galen Strawson.