| TIME
ON OUR SIDE By J.J. Hermsen De Arbeiderspers, 2009 Translated by Laura Vroomen
Gerrit Kouwenaar,
When I woke up this morning– it was about eight o’clock and, save for the birds twittering in the fruit trees, virtually silent – I had to rack my brains to figure out whether it was Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. It mattered, because I was expecting guests from Holland on Thursday, which involved shopping and getting the spare room ready. I frantically tried to open an imaginary calendar in my mind in which I might find today’s date. I had left my diary at home because who needs it during a long summer in the French countryside? And so I had to recover both day and date from memory, something that I think nothing of in the city. But no matter how hard I tried to tell the past couple of days apart and thereby introduce some structure to time and arrive at the right date, I could not work it out and saw only blank, undated pages before me. After barely a week in the middle of nowhere I had lost my sense of time. The impression that I was coasting in time, drifting toward an uncertain future without any beacons or solid ground, confused me. But a moment later this apprehension made way for resignation, relief even. Here, in this languid valley wedged between two rivers, surrounded by the forests, fields and vineyards of the Bergerac, we live by different rules and a time other than that of the punctuality and busy schedules of the home front. Over the past few years, this difference in time and in the experience of time has been the subject of several essays of mine, which I am rewriting during this summer in the French countryside. While the temperature reaches unprecedented heights and time appears to retreat just that little bit further every day, I reread everything that I have written on this complex but fascinating topic. This secluded place is perfect for the job because I have tried to trace another, less common experience of time and to convey the repercussions and richness of this other time. Our hectic life in the city gets in the way of our ability to distinguish between what, in this book, I call ‘clock time’, with its universal rules and rigid divisions, and this other time, which flows beneath our clocks so to speak, calmly and imperturbably, and which appears to touch on a more personal, more internal time. The time of clocks and diaries is an abstract and social time, something we established in order to organize the world, manage international transport, do business. As soon as you disembark from this world, like I did a week ago by travelling here, you disembark from this time and enter another. A time without dates and hours, only different gradations of light: from the delicate morning light to the intense and blinding blue light of noon and the dusky pastel shades of the evening which are gradually engulfed by the pitch-black darkness of night. That’s all there is to it. Day in day out. The sun rises and sets again. This is the cosmic clock that governs life around here. The remarkable thing is that as the day wears on in this seemingly monotonous way, this uninterrupted flow of time is gradually permeated by a profusion of thoughts, fantasies, experiences and memories. Although I do not know what day it is in the morning, I do feel that the day is mine. Instead of being driven by appointments and nervous glances at the clock, I feel more or less in synch with an internal time. In other words, only by disembarking from the world’s timetable can I enter such a thing as my own time. However elusive and complex the phenomenon of “time” is, the premise of the essays in this book is really rather simple. Practically each one, I realized while rereading, is informed by the idea that, since the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time at the end of the nineteenth century, we have been living our lives by clock time, pushing the other, more personal or inner experience of time to the background. We no longer appreciate that clock time, which rules our lives with a fairly heavy hand, was once merely a practical arrangement – “by far the most artificial of all inventions”, to quote the writer W. G. Sebald. On holiday, we have to literally extricate ourselves from the world and its clock time in order to experience what time really is; or rather, to experience how we ourselves are time. Besides having time – or not having it, as we tend to think – we are time, according to Henri Bergson. But this personal or internal time is difficult to label or pin down because it cannot be expressed in common units such as hours or minutes. This other time is something that is experienced rather than measured. That is why, for this book, I have turned to philosophers, writers, musicians and artists who have tried to convey the experience of this other time in their work. Although little can be said about this internal time from a strictly scientific point of view, it is something we really ought to start focusing on again. In the course of the twentieth century, we have gradually submitted to the strict rule of the clock and this has had consequences for the way we view the world and ourselves. The law that by and large governs the regime of clock time is the law of economic returns, whereas the dimension in which the other time carries us is that of our inner self, indeed of our humanity, as St. Augustine and later Ernst Bloch have argued. The point is not to exchange one time for the other, but to recapture this other time and to restore the balance between the two. “Only when the clock stops does time come to life” is a quote from William Faulkner to which I wholeheartedly subscribe. Enhancing our sensitivity to this “true time” with which we can enrich and broaden our time-bound existence is, in short, what I had in mind when I wrote these essays. Cause de Clerans, July 2009
Who
owns time? This may seem like a simple question. Time is ours, you would
think, because everybody gets their brief sojourn in time. How long that
is depends on the amount of time granted to you; some are given thirty,
others fifty or eighty years. Time ticks away a slice of your life with
every second, while also bringing whatever is still in store closer by
the minute. Whether you emphasize the ticking away of the available amount
of time to an ever-expanding past or the heralding of a future that is
slowly coming within reach depends on your character, age and circumstances.
Do you yearn for what has been or do you look forward to what is still
to come? Is time something like “hope” (Bloch) or “the
greatest innovator” (Bacon) or does time open “a relationship
with the infinite” (Levinas)? These three philosophical definitions
say a lot about our possible approaches to time, but they tell us little
about the actual experience of time in everyday life. Over the past 150
years this experience has undergone a fundamental change. So much so,
in fact, that we might ask ourselves if we can still regard time as something
that is ours. Until the adoption of the international time standard in Greenwich in 1884, local time, usually based on astronomical observations, determined the patterns of our daily lives. This was a time based on both the habits of a community and the change of the seasons with its corresponding cycles of sowing and harvesting. The new, international clock time was, as you might say, superimposed on these local times to become the world’s overarching structuring principle. You might even say that the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time marked the start of globalisation and man’s alienation from his local and natural rhythm. The industrialisation of society and the ensuing introduction of factory whistles and time clocks reinforced this trend. Instead of living in some degree of harmony with time, man’s life was now ruled by the clock. Over the course of the twentieth century, man became locked in a struggle with time, brilliantly portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times in 1936. In this film the man with the bowler hat is in danger of being literally devoured by the accelerating machines, while his humanity seems to be crushed by the ruthless regime of the clock that keeps increasing the pace of production. In the end he almost turns into a machine himself. Modern Times was Chaplin’s answer to the futurist manifesto of Filippo Marinetti, who extolled speed and embraced the acceleration of time – “a racing car is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace” – and who raved about the achievements of the industrial era. Chaplin wanted his film to show that if time is seen as merely working time, as a production quota that must be met, man becomes alienated from himself.
Over the course of the twentieth century, these working hours have become
juxtaposed to hard-won “leisure time”. Strangely enough, this
non-work time is now also increasingly spent on activities: foreign travel,
survival trips and other “active holidays” are immensely popular.
Even in our leisure time, it seems, time must not be empty and should
be “filled” to bursting. It looks as if we are doing everything
we can to while away empty time. If there is as much as a hint of boredom,
we immediately zap to our next moment of excitement, as if boredom and
empty time have become so alien to us that they fill us with dread. But
we are also experiencing time as something that is becoming increasingly
scarce. Irrespective of all our new time-saving devices, we are left with
less and less time for rest and relaxation. The faster we can travel,
the less time we have to stay anywhere. The more accessible we are by
mobile phone, email or internet, the less time we have for one another.
Whereas a letter used to take a day or two to reach us, nowadays we are
supposed to reply to an email within an hour. All of this has reinforced
the perception of time as being in short supply. Who owns time? Is our time still our own? There is little to suggest that it is. It looks as if we have surrendered time to laws external to ourselves. Who, for example, has any idea what the fifth-century philosopher St. Augustine meant when he reflected that “time is nothing other than extendedness. The extendedness may be of the mind itself. Therefore, it is in you, O mind of mine, that I measure time.” Who still surmises, rushing from one appointment to the next, that we measure time in ourselves, in our own souls? We measure all kinds of things, especially our lack of time, but few still feel that by measuring time they measure themselves or “the depth of their own soul”. But what we must not forget is that how we think about time is indicative of how we think about ourselves and the world. The global economic downturn and the impending climate crisis may actually offer us a chance to liberate time from the economic straightjacket that we forced it into. In short, it is time to put rest, idleness, boredom and contemplation back onto the political agenda because without these prerequisites for reflection, the democratic dimension of a society cannot be guaranteed. That time remains first and foremost a political-economic construct serving neo-liberal or capitalist ideas is an opinion shared by Alain Badiou. In his book The Century (2004), today’s best-read French philosopher argues that this ideology has led to an extreme form of individualism, which has adopted “the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest” as its motto. However much the Western economy has grown per capita over the past century, we are all familiar with the dark flipside: an unequal distribution of wealth, a depletion of energy resources and a sharp increase in waves of economic and climate refugees. On a more existential level, Badiou believes that this individualism has led to the steady decline in public spirit and solidarity, as well as an increase in fundamental loneliness. Although Badiou is frequently accused of having extreme views, he appears to have the research figures on his side. The Netherlands Institute for Social Research, for instance, reports that in the past few years, we have been spending yet more time on work and other commitments, leaving us with less time for friendship and social contacts. In the United States, the average man has seen his number of friends reduced by more than a half in less than twenty years, from close on four to barely one and a half. Many young people there now have only digital if not anonymous contacts through the internet. The medical consequences of this time pressure on the one hand and the increasing anonymity of human contact on the other are discussed in various international studies: an alarming rise in the number of cases of depression, burn-out, ADHD, PDD-NOS and other autistic disorders, as well as the widespread use of anti-depressants and sleeping pills – accounting for more than two million prescriptions a year in the Netherlands alone. Many are now beginning to realize that a change of tack is needed if we want to avoid rushing towards an inexorable end. In short, the aforementioned future scenarios evoke anything but a sense of spring: it may not be winter yet, but few will deny that the air is distinctly autumnal. That said, amid the colour-changing foliage we do occasionally glimpse a gold-rimmed leaf: the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States is a case in point. The whole world watched as the old presidential tree welcomed this new shoot. Seldom have the hope and the need for change – “yes, we can” – been so eagerly embraced as they were at Obama’s inauguration. The question is whether the president will be granted the time to fulfil his promise of hope and change. This book is also about change, about time and about hope. Aristotle called time “the measure of change” while Ernst Bloch called it “the principle of hope”. Over the centuries, much has been thought and written about time. This book traces these views, focusing specifically on those philosophers, writers and artists who dared to imagine another, more internal and more personal time than the universal “clock time”. This is a much-needed, if not essential complement to ideas about time, all the more because at the start of the twenty-first century we are scarcely even aware of this other time. The economy is not terribly interested in uncovering another kind of experience of time or in a plea for boredom or going slow. This would only encourage us to step out of the rat race of increased productivity, like the vagabond in Modern Times. And yet we need to take a broader view and raise awareness of a time that does not take the slightest notice of profit and loss accounts, that accommodates periods of rest and reflection and thus helps us reclaim our intuition for “time as duration”, as Henri Bergson referred to his concept of an “internal time”. Bergson is one of the philosophers who tried to remind us at the turn of the twentieth century that there is a hard-to-categorize, but therefore no less significant dimension of time inside ourselves. It is totally unique, not interchangeable, and it is much more valuable to our lives than the linear clock time to which we have come to submit ourselves. Bergson will be discussed at length in this book, as will other writers, philosophers and artists who have gone in search of this other time, which has been entrusted to us and which offers us the chance of reflection and creativity. It is a time in which we are submerged when we are bored, or spend a long time waiting or doing nothing. Martin Heidegger spoke of it, and in his wake philosophers such as Lars Svendsen and Awee Prins, all of whom have written in defence of boredom. This other time is a time that frees us from the yoke of the clock and that also unlocks the dimension of our humanity, as we shall see in the essay on Ernst Bloch’s key work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope). It is a time that also enables us to resist the ever-more oppressive regime of uniformity. In
some respects this book is a sequel to my previous collection of essays
Heimwee naar de mens (Nostalgia for Man, 2003). Here I repeat my search
for the essence of our humanity. One of the foundations of this humanity
is time, especially the experience of this “other” time. This
is not a personal hobbyhorse, but a view shared and propagated by people
working in various disciplines, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Politician
Femke Halsema, for instance, has called for going slow, while filmmakers
such as Jiska Rickels and Coco Schrijber make films about boredom and
the deceleration of time and philosophers such as Jan Bor and Hans Achterhuis
write books in which they explore this other dimension of time. [Note
from ed: to be replaced with international figures for foreign editions]
I lend my voice to this slowly swelling chorus by trying to formulate
a philosophical or more existential motivation. But isn’t time too
broad, too abstract and too complex a topic for a book? Doesn’t
a book about time sidestep the urgent need to find answers to a whole
host of concrete, socio-political questions, as outlined above? Can’t
we simply slow down a little and make do with less, the way Halsema and
others advocate? Surely we don’t need all these weighty analyses
about another time ousted by the regime of clock time? I believe we do. Alienation, cynicism, indifference, acceleration, a lost sense of self and a life without any hope or belief in change – this is what the relentless assault of the economic clock has helped bring about. Going slow and consuming less is fairly pointless in my opinion unless it is accompanied by a fundamental overhaul of our approach to time and a thorough exploration of a potentially different experience of time. The point is to revive and hone our intuition for this other time in order to create a new and much-needed balance with clock time. Rather than choosing between one kind of time and another, we ought to restore the precarious balance between the two, so that people can find some respite every once in a while and stop yielding blindly to the demands of economic time. The clock and the wheels of capitalism and the economy, the subject of Chaplin’s razor-sharp analysis in 1936, constitute a reality that nobody can deny or dispense with. But as soon as this experience of time starts to dominate and infiltrate the internal time of reflection, creativity and humanity – blowing it up from within so to speak – things become hairy. So time is running out, party because clock time is exerting ever more control over us, and partly because this other time itself is gently prodding and encouraging us to explore new avenues. Contents Time on our side Preface.
The Place that Time Forgot 9 Sheltering
the Soul. On boredom 29 Epilogue
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