Archive for September, 2009
Time Pieces
Sunday, September 6th, 2009Trippin’ With Aldous
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
“And along with indifference to space there went an even completer indifference to time.
‘There seems to be plenty of it,’ was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.
Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of perceptual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.”
- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954
This book is magic. It really is. So glad to have finally got myself a copy. This book has stayed with me since I first read it in a library in 2003, and since then it’s been one of the books I always look for when in charity shops. A week ago I finally found it, for 29p. Less than a pound for a journey into symbol systems, infinity, Mind at Large, the Not-self and, my favourite, chair legs:
“A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St Michael and all angels”
Time, Fromm, and Momo.
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009Two books I’ve been reading simultaneously couldn’t be more perfectly matched to each other. One is an exploration into the psychology of modern capitalism, the other a story about a little girl who follows a magic tortoise to save the world from some mysterious men in grey suits. The latter is Momo, by Michael Ende (author of The Neverending Story), and the other is The Fear Of Freedom by Erich Fromm.
“Time was so valuable that one felt one should never spend it for any purpose which was not useful.”
- Erich Fromm, The Fear Of Freedom, 1942
This book is incredible. It covers so much that I’ve been wanting to explore – pseudo thinking, freedom (what that means, rather than ‘how to be free’), capitalism, and time. Fromm doesn’t touch too much on time, but this quote set me off wanting to research the rise of time as we know it:
“Significant changes in the psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development in capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life towards the end of the Middle Ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop. Minutes became valuable; a symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nurnberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hour since the sixteenth century.”
Written in 1942, most of what Fromm describes in this book is alive and well and, with the exception of the Nazi party, thriving in 2009. The same can be said of the next book, written in 1973…
“Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, it seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time.”
There’s so much in this book that I could quote here. Entire chapters. I’m putting forward Chapter 6 ‘The Timesaving Bank’ for someone to read at the Time Travel Opportunists night at QUAD on 15th September (more about that soon), as it nails the stuff Fromm talks about in a way that only a book written for nine year olds could. I’ll be buying copies of this book for people, lending out my copy to anyone that wants it, and recommending it to everyone for a long long time…
“Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem an eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.
Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.”
- Michael Ende, Momo, 1973
A Quote About Time From Brian Aldiss
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009“As the tempo of living increases, the celestial being that watches over us seems more and more like a Time and Motion Study man. Our predominant gods and ghouls are scientific.”
- Brian Aldiss, Penguin Science Fiction, 1961.
I got this book at the weekend for a pound. I’m probably far from the only person who automatically picks up old Penguin books because they looks so damn good. This is an original from 1961 and features “up and coming writer Jim Ballard” (J.G. Ballard to you and me). I’ve only read the Ballard story (a really unsettling short about microsonics) and the introduction so far, and already it’s been worth far more than one little pound. The quote above is taken from the introduction by editor Brian Aldiss.
I’ve been collecting quotes about time recently as it seems there’s one or two amazing ones in everything I read. I’ll be putting more up here when I get them out of the books and into the internet.
