But I wanted to give you a taste of my parents thinking processes, and what dinner conversation was like at our house.
Dear Family, Friends, Colleagues, and Fellow Travellers on Time’s Wingéd Chariot:
“Over a decade ago Deirdre and I sent an RSVP to the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), accepting their invitation to present a paper at their annual 2007 conference in Richmond. The conference title was “Time and the Victorian Press,” and although most of the conference presenters ignored the vexed issue of time, we resolutely forged ahead with a paper entitled “Bending Time: the Function of Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Polar Naval Expeditions,” a paper subsequently published in the Society’s journal and in my recent book, Adventures in Polar Reading (2019). It was Deirdre’s bright idea to join our analysis of the role of periodicals aboard ships, on polar bases, and even on sledging journeys together with Albert Einstein’s theory of bending time, “the notion that time itself has its own aspects of relativity depending on the perspective from which it is considered.”
Our daughter Kathryn has a different take on these questions based on her Southeast Asian experience and her anthropological work. She says that anthropologists study the ways that humans deal with “temporal disjunction.” There is a Nepali village called Te where thirty days of each month are counted by moving a pebble from one bowl to another and purifying the new day with sweet-scented smoke of juniper. At the end of the year, the village syncs up their calendar with the national one, toasting to their error! In another example, Tepa family members “steal the crack” between two days — between the sound of the first rooster’s crow and the steel blue of the second day’s dawn — in order to avoid moving a newly-dead loved one out of the house on a day deemed inauspicious.
No reason here to examine the issues we discussed in Richmond, or Kathryn’s fascinating theories, or even whether any of us knew what we were talking about. My convoluted thought is that this year of Covid-19 and its pandemic has wreaked havoc with our notion of time; few people we know who are willing to discuss their pandemic experience fail to mention its distortion of their sense of time. To me it has seemed to expand and contract simultaneously. The days are long, the week abbreviated, and the months instantaneous. And vice versa. That has been a constant in a year in which little else has happened other than our usual routines of a hibernating life—eating, bathing, dressing, reading, and writing. On rereading Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” I think I see a fellow time bender, anticipating two hundred years to adore each of his lover’s breasts,” and “thirty thousand to the rest.” But suddenly the mood changes as “at my back I always hear time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near.”
None of us can know how close the chariot is coming, but it has certainly overtaken a goodly number during this past year, my oldest brother Juan at 91 in Costa Rica after a long and fascinating life, and my younger brother Jim’s wife, Andrea, far too young to be snuffed away. For Deirdre a close cousin and several members of her church women’s group have died, though I should note that few of these deaths are related to the pandemic. I myself had a life-threatening event in September that could easily have called in the chariot. My own allotment of time is uncharacteristic of my disease of ALS—now over eighteen years and counting. At 85, I’m very grateful for the reprieve.”
Dear Family, Friends, Colleagues, and Fellow Travellers on Time’s Wingéd Chariot:
“Over a decade ago Deirdre and I sent an RSVP to the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), accepting their invitation to present a paper at their annual 2007 conference in Richmond. The conference title was “Time and the Victorian Press,” and although most of the conference presenters ignored the vexed issue of time, we resolutely forged ahead with a paper entitled “Bending Time: the Function of Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Polar Naval Expeditions,” a paper subsequently published in the Society’s journal and in my recent book, Adventures in Polar Reading (2019). It was Deirdre’s bright idea to join our analysis of the role of periodicals aboard ships, on polar bases, and even on sledging journeys together with Albert Einstein’s theory of bending time, “the notion that time itself has its own aspects of relativity depending on the perspective from which it is considered.”
Our daughter Kathryn has a different take on these questions based on her Southeast Asian experience and her anthropological work. She says that anthropologists study the ways that humans deal with “temporal disjunction.” There is a Nepali village called Te where thirty days of each month are counted by moving a pebble from one bowl to another and purifying the new day with sweet-scented smoke of juniper. At the end of the year, the village syncs up their calendar with the national one, toasting to their error! In another example, Tepa family members “steal the crack” between two days — between the sound of the first rooster’s crow and the steel blue of the second day’s dawn — in order to avoid moving a newly-dead loved one out of the house on a day deemed inauspicious.
No reason here to examine the issues we discussed in Richmond, or Kathryn’s fascinating theories, or even whether any of us knew what we were talking about. My convoluted thought is that this year of Covid-19 and its pandemic has wreaked havoc with our notion of time; few people we know who are willing to discuss their pandemic experience fail to mention its distortion of their sense of time. To me it has seemed to expand and contract simultaneously. The days are long, the week abbreviated, and the months instantaneous. And vice versa. That has been a constant in a year in which little else has happened other than our usual routines of a hibernating life—eating, bathing, dressing, reading, and writing. On rereading Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” I think I see a fellow time bender, anticipating two hundred years to adore each of his lover’s breasts,” and “thirty thousand to the rest.” But suddenly the mood changes as “at my back I always hear time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near.”
None of us can know how close the chariot is coming, but it has certainly overtaken a goodly number during this past year, my oldest brother Juan at 91 in Costa Rica after a long and fascinating life, and my younger brother Jim’s wife, Andrea, far too young to be snuffed away. For Deirdre a close cousin and several members of her church women’s group have died, though I should note that few of these deaths are related to the pandemic. I myself had a life-threatening event in September that could easily have called in the chariot. My own allotment of time is uncharacteristic of my disease of ALS—now over eighteen years and counting. At 85, I’m very grateful for the reprieve.”
