A Timeless Tapestry

What if time did not really exist as we intuit it? What if were just another dimension out of four, not so very different from the three space dimensions we roam freely in, except in the regard that we did not have the facility to move around so freely in it?
If the entire history of our universe were only a 'tapestry of motion woven with the world-sheets of the strings', so that we live in an essentially 'frozen Universe, viewed from the perspective of a photon,'---since photons move at the speed of light, by relativistic time dilation they do not experience time at all, nor space; they are everywhere at once---'in which neither time nor space has any meaning, and everything that ever was or ever will be just is'?
That would give determinism a whole new twist. But if we never could know, if our movement in the fourth dimension is really fixed and restricted in such drastic ways, would that matter? We are not photons, and we could never be in every place or time at once. The future is still a mystery to us, even if we can say that it has been fated. Our lives are still unfolding, not spread out in plain sight before us. Such a radical view of time could even be liberating instead of suffocating.
If you believed hard enough in it, maybe you could draw solace from it, as Einstein did: when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died in 1955, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

(quotes in second paragraph drawn from John Gribbin's In Search of Schrödinger's Kittens)