America #52, Time #20

It's all very well for you to look as if, since you've had no past, you're going in, as the next best thing, for a magnificent compensatory future. What are you going to make your future of, for all your airs, we want to know?—what elements of a future, as futures have gone in the great world, are at all assured to you?... No, what you are reduced to for "importance" is the present, pure and simple, squaring itself between an absent future and an absent past as solidly as it can.

Henry James, The American Scene (1907)

Time #19, Books on Books #6

[L]a plupart des grands auteurs contemporains, Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Gide, V. Woolf, chacun à sa manière, ont tenté de mutiler le temps. Les uns l'ont privé de passé et d'avenir pour le réduire à l'intuition pure de l'instant ; d'autres, comme Dos Passos, en font une mémoire morte et close. Proust et Faulkner l'ont simplement décapité, ils lui ont ôté son avenir, c'est-à-dire la dimension des actes et de la liberté.


Most of the great contemporary authors, Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Gide, and Virginia Woolf, have tried, each in his own way, to distort time. Some of them have deprived it of its past and future in order to reduce it to the pure intuition of the instant; others, like Dos Passos, have made of it a dead and closed memory. Proust and Faulkner have simply decapitated it. They have deprived it of its future, that is, its dimension of deeds and freedom.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1939)

Cinema #44, Memory #8, Time #18

To speak—perhaps to write?—of Casablanca is like looking at an old photograph: there you are but somehow that is not you: in between there is memory, the time that went by and the renewed photofinish, its battle with time won—and lost. Time does not pass: you pass through time and as in a narrow hedge of brambles you leave your clothes and skin on the thorns too. In short, time is like the bank in roulette: it always wins. (It wins even when it loses.) And it has won against Casablanca. It that obsolete, distant, almost ridiculous and false movie the one which you so lovingly remembered? Is the petulant part of Claude Rains the perfect portrayal of a gentleman in cynic’s clothing that we treasured in our memory? And Humphrey Bogart, isn’t he a caricature of what he pretends to be, with his absurd existentialist gallantry? And isn’t Paul Henreid ridiculous as the hero of the Resistance that they oblige him to be? Instead of conspiring underground and keeping himself hidden he devotes himself to conducting the Marseillaise in front of all the Germans, like a laughable apprentice of Leopold Stokowski? And what about Conrad Veidt, with his real German accent made into a phony one by the falseness of his role as a stupid Prussian gentlemen? To the cronista’s questions, the reader can in turn ask: “So, then, why the four points (the sign of excellence), what are they for?” They are for memory.

G. Cain (a.k.a. Guillermo Cabrera Infante), “Time v. Cinema” (June 2, 1956)

Time #17, History #14, Order of the Universe #27

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” Essays, First Series (1841)

Time #16, The Sea #7

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wash’d them power while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou;—
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,—
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime,
Dark-heaving—boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity, the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.


Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, Stanzas 182-183

Memory #7, Books on Books #3, Time #15, Shakespeare #7

Thy glasse will shew thee how thy beauties were,
Thy dyall how thy pretious mynuits waste,
The vacant leaues thy mindes imprint will beare,
And of this booke, this learning maist thou taste.
The wrinckles which thy glasse will truly show,
Of mouthed graues will giue thee memorie,
Thou by thy dyals shady stealth maist know,
Times theeuish progresse to eternitie.
Looke what thy memorie cannot containe,
Commit to these waste blacks, and thou shalt finde
Those children nurst, deliuerd from thy braine,
To take a new acquaintance of thy minde.
These offices, so oft as thou wilt looke,
Shall profit thee, and much inrich thy booke.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXVII

Time #14, Faulkner #7

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Quentin Compson, in The Sound and the Fury

Apocalypse #13, Death #5, Time #14

The result would inevitably be a state of universal rest and death, if the universe were finite and left to obey existing laws. But it is impossible to conceive a limit to the extent of matter in the universe; and therefore science points rather to an endless progress, through an endless space, of action involving the transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and hence into heat, than to a single finite mechanism, running down like a clock, and stopping for ever.

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat" (1862)

Time #13

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

Vladimir Nabokov

Time #11, WCW #6, History #9

If history could be that which annihilated all memory of past things from our minds it would be a useful tyranny.

But since it lives in us practically day by day we should fear it. But if it is, as it may be, a tyranny over the souls of the dead—and so the imaginations of the living—where lies our greatest well of inspiration, our greatest hope of freedom (since the future is totally blank, if not black) we should guard it doubly from the interlopers.


Williams Carlos Williams, “The Virtue of History” in The American Grain (1925)

Cinema #30, Time #10

[Max Ophuls’s] elegant characters lack nothing and lose everything. There is no escape from the trap of time. Not even the deepest and sincerest love can deter the now from its rendezvous with the then, and no amount of self-sacrifice can prevent desire from becoming embalmed in memory. “Quelle heure est-il?” ask the characters in La Ronde, but it is always too late, and the moment has always passed.

This is the ultimate meaning of Ophulsian camera movement: time has no stop. Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment. As we follow the Ophulsian characters, step by step, up and down stairs, up and down streets, and round and round the ballroom, we realize their imprisonment in time. We know that they can never escape, but we know also that they will never lose their pose and grace for the sake of futile desperation. They will dance beautifully, they will walk purposively, they will love deeply, and they will die gallantly, and they will never whine or whimper or even discard their vanity. It will all end in a circus with Lola Montès selling her presence to the multitudes, redeeming all men both as a woman and as an artistic creation, expressing one long receding shot, the cumulative explosion of the romantic ego for the past two centuries.

Andrew Sarris, entry on Max Ophuls, in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968
last shot of Lola Montez (1955)

Time #9

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejeune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.

Robert Smithson, "Of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967)

Time #6, Apocalypse #7, Shakespeare #6

When I haue seene by times fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworne buried age,
When sometime loftie towers I see downe rased,
And brasse eternall slaue to mortall rage.
When I haue seene the hungry Ocean gaine
Aduantage on the Kingdome of the shoare,
And the firme soile win of the watry maine,
Increasing store with losse, and losse with store.
When I haue seene such interchange of state,
Or state it selfe confounded, to decay,
Ruine hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my loue away.
 This thought is as a death which cannot choose
 But weepe to haue, that which it feares to loose.


William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV

America #4, Time #5, History #1

Since Americans have recently found it more comfortable to see where they have been than to think of where they are going, their state of mind has become increasingly passive and spectatorial. Historical novels, fictionalized biographies, collections of pictures and cartoons, books on American regions and rivers, have poured forth to satisfy a ravenous appetite for Americana. This quest for the American past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than of critical analysis. An awareness of history is always a part of any culturally alert national life; but I believe that what underlies this overpowering nostalgia of the last fifteen years is a keen feeling of insecurity. The two world wars, unstable booms, and the abysmal depression of our time have profoundly shaken national confidence in the future. During the boom of the twenties it was commonly taken for granted that the happy days could run on into an indefinite future; today there are few who do not assume just as surely the coming of another severe economic slump. If the future seems dark, the past by contrast looks rosier than ever; but it is use far less to locate and guide the present than to give reassurance. American history, presenting itself as a rich and rewarding spectacle, a succession of well-fulfilled promises, induces a desire to observe and enjoy, not to analyze and act. The most common vision of national life, in its fondness for the panoramic backward gaze, has been that of the observation-car platform.

Richard Hofstadter, Introduction, The American Political Tradition (1948)

Time #5, Memory #6

Already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty--not even that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

Apocalypse #6, Time #4

Le passé ne sert qu’à connaître l’actualité. Mais l’actualité m’échappe. Qu’est-ce que c’est donc que l’actualité?

Henri Focillon

Time #3

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual only for one time
And only one place

T.S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday" (excerpt)

Architecture #1, Time #2

[T]he greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even approval of condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

John Ruskin, "The Lamp of Memory," The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)

Diptych #1, Love #7, Time #1, Auden #7

Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long Love's Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Shouldst Rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable Love should grow
Vaster than Empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes and on thy Forehead Gaze;
Two hundred to adore each Breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this State,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (excerpt), first published 1681



  "Love has no ending.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

"I'll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

"The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world."

W.H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening" (excerpt), 1938

Time #1, Apocalypse #4, America #1, Melville #1

(The poor old Past,
The Future’s slave.
She drudged through pain and crime
To bring about the blissful Prime,
Then—perished. There’s a grave!)

Power unanointed may come—
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome.
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main ;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age has been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win) ;
And death be busy with all who strive—
Death with silent negative.

Herman Melville, “The Conflict of Convictions” [excerpt]
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War