Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content, context, and running commentary — this is my time and theme. All the rest is numerical symbol or some aspect of Space. The texture of Space is not that of Time, and the piebald four-dimensional sport bred by relativists is a quadruped with one leg replaced by the ghost of a leg. My time is also Motionless Time (we shall presently dispose of ‘flowing’ time, water-clock time, water-closet time).

The Time I am concerned with is only the Time stopped by me and closely attended to by my tense-willed mind. Thus it would be idle and evil to drag in ‘passing’ time. Of course, I shave longer when my thought ‘tries on’ words; of course, I am not aware of the lag until I look at my watch; of course, at fifty years of age, one year seems to pass faster because it is a smaller fraction of my increased stock of existence and also because I am less often bored than I was in childhood between dull game and duller book. But that ‘quickening’ depends precisely upon one’s not being attentive to Time.

It is a queer enterprise — this attempt to determine the nature of something consisting of phantomic phases. Yet I trust that my reader, who by now is frowning over these lines (but ignoring, at least, his breakfast), will agree with me that there is nothing more splendid than lone thought; and lone thought must plod on, or — to use a less ancient analogy — drive on, say, in a sensitive, admirably balanced Greek car that shows its sweet temper and road-holding assurance at every turn of the alpine highway.

Two fallacies should be dealt with before we go any further. The first is the confusion of temporal elements with spatial ones. Space, the impostor, has been already denounced in these notes (which are now being set down during half a day’s break in a crucial journey); his trial will take place at a later stage of our investigation. The second dismissal is that of an immemorial habit of speech. We regard Time as a kind of stream, having little to do with an actual mountain torrent showing white against a black cliff or a dull-colored great river in a windy valley, but running invariably through our chronographical landscapes. We are so used to that mythical spectacle, so keen upon liquefying every lap of life, that we end up by being unable to speak of Time without speaking of physical motion. Actually, of course, the sense of its motion is derived from many natural, or at least familiar, sources — the body’s innate awareness of its own bloodstream, the ancient vertigo caused by rising stars, and, of course, our methods of measurement, such as the creeping shadow line of a gnomon, the trickle of an hourglass, the trot of a second hand — and here we are back in Space. Note the frames, the receptacles. The idea that Time ‘flows’ as naturally as an apple thuds down on a garden table implies that it flows in and through something else and if we take that ‘something’ to be Space then we have only a metaphor flowing along a yardstick.

But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide — as those who know their Verlaine will note).