Sur la pluralité des temps

 

[With apologies to Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686). ]

A historian writes, that our modern sense of Time is no older than the industrialism of the United States;  though Time, to be sure, itself is rather older.

How does this fit in with the Bergsonian dichotomy of temps vesus durée (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889) ?

 

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Note:

Newton himself, not concerned with psychology,  conflates the two:

Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself and from its nature, without relation to anything exernal, flows equally; and its other name is duration.

-- Principia Mathematica

 

In histories of science, that passage may be cited in distinction to Einstein’s relativistic doctrines.  But one historian notes a caveat well prior to relativity:

 

Somehow Newton failed to see the circularity of this definition.  It has become clear since his day  that his concept of uniform (“equal”) flow of time  was redundant, since it is impossible to give any meaning to such an assertion of uniformity  unless the concept of time is already established.

-- Lloyd Taylor, Physics: the Pioneer Science (1941)

In the context of Relativity, self-standing Time  is abolished altogether:

 

“Raum für sich  und Zeit für sich  sollen völlig zu Schatten herabsinken, und nur noch eine Art Union der beiden soll Selbständigkeit bewahren.” (Minkowski, 1909)

(“Independent Space and Time  must sink into the shadowland”.)

 

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Temps (the usual word for ‘time” in French) is a feature of physics;  durée (lit. ‘duration’), a feature of lived experience, of the mind.

The former experienced its own bifurcation into (absolute) Newtonian time, and (relative to the observer) Einsteinian or Relativistic time.  Though cognitively uncomfortable to the many, at the time of its introduction, after a bit of familiarity  it all fits comfortably into basic math and physics, the former being simply a limiting case of the latter.   (Similarly, the intelletual scandal of the discovery of Non-Euclidean Geometry  was eventually digested, with the Euclidean being a sort of limiting case of the Spherical and the Hyperbolic.)

So now (per our historian) we must wrestle with a new entity:  Taylorized time -- time cut into lengths by the stop-watch brandished by a steely-eyed time-and-motion man, seeking to squeeze the last ounce (excuse me -- millilitre) out of the workforce.

Since that has nothing to do with physics, it is no contribution to our understanding of temps, but is rather a new take on durée, varying historically and culturally.

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Footnote:  I have always been a bit puzzled by Proust’s title A la recherche du temps perdu.   How shall we characterize his use of temps here?  One subtlety:  its implications and connotations evolve in the course of the novel.   A literal translation, In Search of Lost Time, sounds trivial, terrible.  Translator Scott-Moncrieff neatly skirted the problem with his resort to the Shakespearian Remembrance of Things Past.

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For further pensées concerning Time, from both literature and from physics, try these:

=>  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/time

 

Sister Wendy: fiat lux

 

From The Story of Painting (1994), by Sister Wendy Beckett.

 

 

Re Andrea Mantegna, Death of the Virgin (ca. 1460):

 

The serene sun    bathes

lakes, palaces, priests

 

   and the dead virgin,

 

in the same  quiet  light.

 

~

 

Re the Erythraean Sibyl, from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel:

 

pinks   glazed to whiteness

by the intensity   of the light

 

~

 

Re the tunic in Titian’s Ranuccio Farnese (1542):

 

The rich cloth  dazzles and shimmers

in the light falling on the boy’s chest --

the red almost bleached out,

so that bright gold and silver remains,

like the plumage of a bird.

 

 

Re the monochrome background in the same painting:

 

the all-enveloping blackness

in which Ranuccio is like a small, lighted candle

 

 

Algren’s Acolytes

 

I learned of Nelson Algren  via two quite different routes:  reading his gritty novel The Man with the Golden Arm; and through Simone de Beauvoir’s roman à clef, Les Mandarins, where she gives a textured portrayal (lightly fictionalized) of their vortex-laden affaire.

 

Algren’s overall arc of life  had its ups and downs -- increasingly, downs -- and in time his work came to be little read.   Jonathan Dee published a perceptive and wide-ranging retrospective of the man in the 15 April 2019 New Yorker (“Street Cred”), noting a certain localized resurgence of interest in this sinewy writer, and reviewing a fine new biography  by Colin Asher.   The article culminates in this summing up:

 

Instead of an audience of millions, then, a steady file  of bright, devoted, flame-tending acolytes.  There are sadder afterlives.

 

Aubades et Sérénades

 

Aubades:

 

Dawn made itself felt

in a gathering whiteness

eastward  over the river.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

 

tatters of night lingered,

diluted to blue

-- Cornell Woolrich, I Married a Dead Man (1948)

 

The sun  bubbled up  from the horizon,

and shone through the haze of floury dust

sighing down from the Sahara.

-- Neil Stephenson, The Confusion (2004)

 

Lights began to snap on

in bedrooms, then in kitchens.

In the growing lavender of daybreak, the carny took shape.

-- William Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946)

 

 

Sérénades:

 

The long procession of lamps

on the beautiful street

was flaring  in the clear  red  of the sunset

towards which it marched . .  .  .    .

-- Wm Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884-5)

 

a rich golden light  clung to the leaves  like batter

-- T.  Coraghessan Boyle,  World’s End (1987), p. 129

 

Archetypes and Acolytes

 

After the prophet

come the disciples;

after the disciples

comes the church;

and with the church 

comes the hierarchy.

-- Max Eastman, Love and Revolution (1964)

 

For a recap of that progression  in the epic cases of Freud and of Chomsky, together with personal recollections of the towering Romance Philologist, Yakov Malkiel, see:

 

=>   https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes.html

 

Wintry Light

 

It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons 

in early winter,

 

when the daylight is silver

  rather than gold,

and pewter    rather than silver.

-- G.K. Chesterton, “God of the Gongs” (1914)

 

~ ~ ~

 

People were wearing

lace shawls of snowflakes.

A low dark cloud was sitting there,

thinking of some way

to unload snow  over the city.

-- Len Deighton, Funeral in Berlin (1964)