The Devil's Pleasure Garden: Time Goes Limp

Time Goes Limp

“Now Besso 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.”—Albert Einstein

“While not having much physics, I reject Einstein’s slick formulae; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist.”—Vladimir Nabokov, who nevertheless did agree to the extent that “I confess, I do not believe in time.”

I dug these quotations out because my review of Nolan’s The Odyssey, which turned into a survey of classicism, according to my limited lights, brought me back to Erich Auerbach, and his distinction between Homer’s style of narration and the Elohist’s in the Abraham story, a difference, if I may brutally overgeneralize, between space and time, between details and depth.

Depth—the heart, the conscience—is expressed and developed by time. For classisists, down to the last century, depth is an illusion. “In three words,” said Robert Frost, “I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

It invades even our own moment, for our political Left argues from feelings, with which the Right is increasingly impatient.

My own conscience, what there is of it, bothered me after I reunited with Auerbach, for in my piece on The “Character Arc” I had attributed that obsession to post-Renaissance Puritanism, and the necessity to develop one’s “character,” to save oneself, to be among the Elect.

Auerbach shines a larger light:

Herein lies the reason why the great figures of the Old Testament are so much more fully developed, so much more fraught with their own biographical past, so much more distinct as individuals, than are the Homeric heroes. Achilles and Odysseus are splendidly described…but they have no development, and their life-histories are clearly set forth once and for all…. Humiliation and elevation go far deeper and far higher than in Homer, and they belong basically together. The poor beggar Odysseus is only masquerading, but Adam is really cast down.

In character as in history, time is development, or it's pointless. Herodotus and Thucydides have no such sense. They may want to teach something, how not to lose, but their concerns are immediate, local. Our Judeo-Christian sense of history delivers us to a present fraught with the past, whereas classicists like Paul Valéry tells us “We should see to it that the past is not merely half dead.” And as for our, what, selves, “If we are to be judged by God, why by what we are at the end, and not what we were in the middle?”

Valéry was the influence on Eliot and Auden, sometimes to the point of plagiarism, but they combined him with their Christian faith and got, as it were, the worst of both worlds.

For without that comfort (and such deeply serious Christians as Greene and Updyke have warned us it's disappearing), we are washed up on a shore trailing no past, with only a heady but alarming—a classical—mysticism of the present.

(Which is not to be confused with carpe diem: “Simply to live for the moment,” says Valéry, “what could be harder?”)

Dalí enjoys the thought: “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”

Transformations, yes, as in changing your views. Says Valéry, “perhaps this faculty of transformation is the very essence of the real ‘I’”

That other classist Federico Fellini traces his transformations with some ambivilance, but “Change!” says Marcello to the feminist tribunal in City of Women. “Into what?”

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, lives Greece, Irish citizen. He is of towering intellect but, as is often the case with such people, not that bright.