User:Loes van Dorp/Joke Hermsen English

TIME ON OUR SIDE

A Plea for a Slow Future

By J.J. Hermsen

De Arbeiderspers, 2009

Translated by Laura Vroomen

It is late again like every year,

time is short on the here and now,

today has always been and gone

so light the candle that the future can spare,

break the bread that still can hear,

realize the words behind the signs,

spell the flesh, stop the clocks, live a while –

Gerrit Kouwenaar,

from: Time is wide open (1996)

Preface

The Place that Time Forgot

When I woke up this morning– it was about eight o’clock and, save for the birds twittering in the fruit trees, virtually silent – I had to rack my brains to figure out whether it was Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. It mattered, because I was expecting guests from Holland on Thursday, which involved shopping and getting the spare room ready. I frantically tried to open an imaginary calendar in my mind in which I might find today’s date. I had left my diary at home because who needs it during a long summer in the French countryside? And so I had to recover both day and date from memory, something that I think nothing of in the city. But no matter how hard I tried to tell the past couple of days apart and thereby introduce some structure to time and arrive at the right date, I could not work it out and saw only blank, undated pages before me. After barely a week in the middle of nowhere I had lost my sense of time. The impression that I was coasting in time, drifting toward an uncertain future without any beacons or solid ground, confused me. But a moment later this apprehension made way for resignation, relief even. Here, in this languid valley wedged between two rivers, surrounded by the forests, fields and vineyards of the Bergerac, we live by different rules and a time other than that of the punctuality and busy schedules of the home front.

Over the past few years, this difference in time and in the experience of time has been the subject of several essays of mine, which I am rewriting during this summer in the French countryside. While the temperature reaches unprecedented heights and time appears to retreat just that little bit further every day, I reread everything that I have written on this complex but fascinating topic. This secluded place is perfect for the job because I have tried to trace another, less common experience of time and to convey the repercussions and richness of this other time. Our hectic life in the city gets in the way of our ability to distinguish between what, in this book, I call ‘clock time’, with its universal rules and rigid divisions, and this other time, which flows beneath our clocks so to speak, calmly and imperturbably, and which appears to touch on a more personal, more internal time. The time of clocks and diaries is an abstract and social time, something we established in order to organize the world, manage international transport, do business. As soon as you disembark from this world, like I did a week ago by travelling here, you disembark from this time and enter another. A time without dates and hours, only different gradations of light: from the delicate morning light to the intense and blinding blue light of noon and the dusky pastel shades of the evening which are gradually engulfed by the pitch-black darkness of night. That’s all there is to it. Day in day out. The sun rises and sets again. This is the cosmic clock that governs life around here. The remarkable thing is that as the day wears on in this seemingly monotonous way, this uninterrupted flow of time is gradually permeated by a profusion of thoughts, fantasies, experiences and memories. Although I do not know what day it is in the morning, I do feel that the day is mine. Instead of being driven by appointments and nervous glances at the clock, I feel more or less in synch with an internal time. In other words, only by disembarking from the world’s timetable can I enter such a thing as my own time.

However elusive and complex the phenomenon of “time” is, the premise of the essays in this book is really rather simple. Practically each one, I realized while rereading, is informed by the idea that, since the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time at the end of the nineteenth century, we have been living our lives by clock time, pushing the other, more personal or inner experience of time to the background. We no longer appreciate that clock time, which rules our lives with a fairly heavy hand, was once merely a practical arrangement – “by far the most artificial of all inventions”, to quote the writer W. G. Sebald. On holiday, we have to literally extricate ourselves from the world and its clock time in order to experience what time really is; or rather, to experience how we ourselves are time. Besides having time – or not having it, as we tend to think – we are time, according to Henri Bergson. But this personal or internal time is difficult to label or pin down because it cannot be expressed in common units such as hours or minutes. This other time is something that is experienced rather than measured. That is why, for this book, I have turned to philosophers, writers, musicians and artists who have tried to convey the experience of this other time in their work. Although little can be said about this internal time from a strictly scientific point of view, it is something we really ought to start focusing on again. In the course of the twentieth century, we have gradually submitted to the strict rule of the clock and this has had consequences for the way we view the world and ourselves. The law that by and large governs the regime of clock time is the law of economic returns, whereas the dimension in which the other time carries us is that of our inner self, indeed of our humanity, as St. Augustine and later Ernst Bloch have argued. The point is not to exchange one time for the other, but to recapture this other time and to restore the balance between the two. “Only when the clock stops does time come to life” is a quote from William Faulkner to which I wholeheartedly subscribe. Enhancing our sensitivity to this “true time” with which we can enrich and broaden our time-bound existence is, in short, what I had in mind when I wrote these essays.

Cause de Clerans, July 2009

Chapter 1

Time is Running Out

Who owns time? This may seem like a simple question. Time is ours, you would think, because everybody gets their brief sojourn in time. How long that is depends on the amount of time granted to you; some are given thirty, others fifty or eighty years. Time ticks away a slice of your life with every second, while also bringing whatever is still in store closer by the minute. Whether you emphasize the ticking away of the available amount of time to an ever-expanding past or the heralding of a future that is slowly coming within reach depends on your character, age and circumstances. Do you yearn for what has been or do you look forward to what is still to come? Is time something like “hope” (Bloch) or “the greatest innovator” (Bacon) or does time open “a relationship with the infinite” (Levinas)? These three philosophical definitions say a lot about our possible approaches to time, but they tell us little about the actual experience of time in everyday life. Over the past 150 years this experience has undergone a fundamental change. So much so, in fact, that we might ask ourselves if we can still regard time as something that is ours.

Many of our everyday expressions and sayings are about time. You can have too much or too little of it, you can manage, serve or mark it, it can heal wounds or you can be ahead of it. Time plays a leading part in our lives, but time also escapes us, slips through our fingers, as soon as we try to get to the heart of it. Of course we can explain the precise workings of a clock, but we cannot put our finger on what this clock alludes to: time. Time is one of the greatest riddles of life, as both philosophers and contemporary scientists have stressed. The only thing that we can say with any certainty is that we experience time as something that seems to be accelerating and as something we appear to be having less and less of.

Until the adoption of the international time standard in Greenwich in 1884, local time, usually based on astronomical observations, determined the patterns of our daily lives. This was a time based on both the habits of a community and the change of the seasons with its corresponding cycles of sowing and harvesting. The new, international clock time was, as you might say, superimposed on these local times to become the world’s overarching structuring principle. You might even say that the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time marked the start of globalisation and man’s alienation from his local and natural rhythm. The industrialisation of society and the ensuing introduction of factory whistles and time clocks reinforced this trend. Instead of living in some degree of harmony with time, man’s life was now ruled by the clock. Over the course of the twentieth century, man became locked in a struggle with time, brilliantly portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times in 1936. In this film the man with the bowler hat is in danger of being literally devoured by the accelerating machines, while his humanity seems to be crushed by the ruthless regime of the clock that keeps increasing the pace of production. In the end he almost turns into a machine himself. Modern Times was Chaplin’s answer to the futurist manifesto of Filippo Marinetti, who extolled speed and embraced the acceleration of time – “a racing car is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace” – and who raved about the achievements of the industrial era. Chaplin wanted his film to show that if time is seen as merely working time, as a production quota that must be met, man becomes alienated from himself.

Over the course of the twentieth century, these working hours have become juxtaposed to hard-won “leisure time”. Strangely enough, this non-work time is now also increasingly spent on activities: foreign travel, survival trips and other “active holidays” are immensely popular. Even in our leisure time, it seems, time must not be empty and should be “filled” to bursting. It looks as if we are doing everything we can to while away empty time. If there is as much as a hint of boredom, we immediately zap to our next moment of excitement, as if boredom and empty time have become so alien to us that they fill us with dread. But we are also experiencing time as something that is becoming increasingly scarce. Irrespective of all our new time-saving devices, we are left with less and less time for rest and relaxation. The faster we can travel, the less time we have to stay anywhere. The more accessible we are by mobile phone, email or internet, the less time we have for one another. Whereas a letter used to take a day or two to reach us, nowadays we are supposed to reply to an email within an hour. All of this has reinforced the perception of time as being in short supply. A few years ago, in a special supplement to the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, Hans Achterhuis wrote that this increasing pressure on time is not only a source of concern to philosophers, sociologists and psychologists but also to politicians. The liberal and social-democrat coalition government that was in power between 1998 and 2002 suggested to the then-minister of Housing, Land Use Planning and the Environment, Jan Pronk, that he add the phenomenon of “time” to his portfolio. According to the cabinet, the country was in the grip of a permanent time shortage, or even time poverty, and something had to be done about it. Believing that time belongs to the private sphere, Minister Pronk refused to include “time” in his portfolio. According to Achterhuis, this position blurred “the gap between these fine ideological words and the reality on the ground”, because time had long since ceased to be a private matter. Achterhuis believes that in contemporary society, time is regulated from outside, while in the private sphere, externally imposed time is the rule. Besides, capitalist ideology continually seduces us into buying new products. The sociologist Anton Zijderveld has labelled this “staccato culture”. We want more, we want the latest and we want it now. It is no exaggeration to say that the economy is governing time and therefore also our private experience of time. The question is which experiences are forced to take a back seat as a result and what impact does this have on ourselves and our society? Anyone who consults the many future scenarios commissioned by Western governments and corporations around the turn of the millennium will come away with a less than rosy picture of what the next fifty years will bring us in Western Europe. Social divisions are expected to widen, the terror threat is to increase and the effects of climate change will become ever more extreme. The historic city centres and the pleasant suburbs will house the more affluent, highly educated citizens who, if not floored by stress or burn-out, will work flat out and protect their properties with fences and CCTV cameras. The impoverished urban peripheries will be occupied by large groups of unemployed people and illegal immigrants, unable to find jobs in the knowledge-based economy. The entire population is in the grip of growing unrest and insecurity because society is becoming increasingly complex and the technological changes are accelerating. In short, the experience awaiting us – and which is already gathering momentum – is that time is running out. On the one hand, we must act swiftly if we want to limit the effects of climate change. On the other, there is increasing pressure to step up production and innovation to get the economy back on track. We appear to have reached an impasse at the start of the twenty-first century: the climate asks for less, the economy for more; man wants to slow down, society to speed up.

Underlying these future scenarios is the acceleration of time and production. There is a growing sense that time has run riot and is now impossible to keep up with. Because the changes are happening so fast and nobody feels capable of adapting to them, people have a sense of lagging behind, before feeling sidelined altogether. To avoid this, people feel forced to try and keep up with the changes. So they end up running around like headless chickens, because there is almost no time to assimilate the many changes. This time-pressed individual ends up giving the impression of being a timeless individual, that is to say, somebody who is no longer in step with time. We want to go slow, find peace and quiet and consume less, but we appear to be struggling to do so. And so we lose the sense that time belongs to us. All in all, we have become quite alienated from the classical philosophical idea that rest and idleness are the foundations of a civilization. There is a reason why the word “school” derives from the Greek word “scholè”, meaning “rest”, among other things. Only when we are at rest, during the interval between two actions, can we arrive at contemplation and reflection. Only idleness will open the space of thought and creativity, phenomena that will not be driven or forced by a particular target or by profit. As Timo Slootweg writes in the collection of essays Bij tijd en wijle (Every Now and Then, 2004), rest and idleness have been the prerequisites of culture and civilization since Plato and Aristotle’s time. According to the Greek philosophers, a democratic statesman’s most important job was to foster such rest. A tyrant, on the other hand, seeks to increase his power by keeping the people occupied, that is to say, restless and unreflective. You might ask yourself whether our Western society, in which most governments extol the virtues of hard work and in which most decisions are taken on purely economic grounds, can still be regarded as democratic. Being busy, having a hectic schedule and receiving lots of phone calls is synonymous with success. If, one morning, we receive hardly any emails or phone calls panic kicks in. Emptiness, rest and idleness are no longer sources of inspiration, but the fearsome harbingers of a failed existence on the margins of society. Having time to yourself is a luxury that few politicians openly aspire to.

Who owns time? Is our time still our own? There is little to suggest that it is. It looks as if we have surrendered time to laws external to ourselves. Who, for example, has any idea what the fifth-century philosopher St. Augustine meant when he reflected that “time is nothing other than extendedness. The extendedness may be of the mind itself. Therefore, it is in you, O mind of mine, that I measure time.” Who still surmises, rushing from one appointment to the next, that we measure time in ourselves, in our own souls? We measure all kinds of things, especially our lack of time, but few still feel that by measuring time they measure themselves or “the depth of their own soul”. But what we must not forget is that how we think about time is indicative of how we think about ourselves and the world. The global economic downturn and the impending climate crisis may actually offer us a chance to liberate time from the economic straightjacket that we forced it into. In short, it is time to put rest, idleness, boredom and contemplation back onto the political agenda because without these prerequisites for reflection, the democratic dimension of a society cannot be guaranteed.

That time remains first and foremost a political-economic construct serving neo-liberal or capitalist ideas is an opinion shared by Alain Badiou. In his book The Century (2004), today’s best-read French philosopher argues that this ideology has led to an extreme form of individualism, which has adopted “the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest” as its motto. However much the Western economy has grown per capita over the past century, we are all familiar with the dark flipside: an unequal distribution of wealth, a depletion of energy resources and a sharp increase in waves of economic and climate refugees. On a more existential level, Badiou believes that this individualism has led to the steady decline in public spirit and solidarity, as well as an increase in fundamental loneliness. Although Badiou is frequently accused of having extreme views, he appears to have the research figures on his side. The Netherlands Institute for Social Research, for instance, reports that in the past few years, we have been spending yet more time on work and other commitments, leaving us with less time for friendship and social contacts. In the United States, the average man has seen his number of friends reduced by more than a half in less than twenty years, from close on four to barely one and a half. Many young people there now have only digital if not anonymous contacts through the internet. The medical consequences of this time pressure on the one hand and the increasing anonymity of human contact on the other are discussed in various international studies: an alarming rise in the number of cases of depression, burn-out, ADHD, PDD-NOS and other autistic disorders, as well as the widespread use of anti-depressants and sleeping pills – accounting for more than two million prescriptions a year in the Netherlands alone. Many are now beginning to realize that a change of tack is needed if we want to avoid rushing towards an inexorable end.

In short, the aforementioned future scenarios evoke anything but a sense of spring: it may not be winter yet, but few will deny that the air is distinctly autumnal. That said, amid the colour-changing foliage we do occasionally glimpse a gold-rimmed leaf: the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States is a case in point. The whole world watched as the old presidential tree welcomed this new shoot. Seldom have the hope and the need for change – “yes, we can” – been so eagerly embraced as they were at Obama’s inauguration. The question is whether the president will be granted the time to fulfil his promise of hope and change.

This book is also about change, about time and about hope. Aristotle called time “the measure of change” while Ernst Bloch called it “the principle of hope”. Over the centuries, much has been thought and written about time. This book traces these views, focusing specifically on those philosophers, writers and artists who dared to imagine another, more internal and more personal time than the universal “clock time”. This is a much-needed, if not essential complement to ideas about time, all the more because at the start of the twenty-first century we are scarcely even aware of this other time. The economy is not terribly interested in uncovering another kind of experience of time or in a plea for boredom or going slow. This would only encourage us to step out of the rat race of increased productivity, like the vagabond in Modern Times. And yet we need to take a broader view and raise awareness of a time that does not take the slightest notice of profit and loss accounts, that accommodates periods of rest and reflection and thus helps us reclaim our intuition for “time as duration”, as Henri Bergson referred to his concept of an “internal time”.

Bergson is one of the philosophers who tried to remind us at the turn of the twentieth century that there is a hard-to-categorize, but therefore no less significant dimension of time inside ourselves. It is totally unique, not interchangeable, and it is much more valuable to our lives than the linear clock time to which we have come to submit ourselves. Bergson will be discussed at length in this book, as will other writers, philosophers and artists who have gone in search of this other time, which has been entrusted to us and which offers us the chance of reflection and creativity. It is a time in which we are submerged when we are bored, or spend a long time waiting or doing nothing. Martin Heidegger spoke of it, and in his wake philosophers such as Lars Svendsen and Awee Prins, all of whom have written in defence of boredom. This other time is a time that frees us from the yoke of the clock and that also unlocks the dimension of our humanity, as we shall see in the essay on Ernst Bloch’s key work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope). It is a time that also enables us to resist the ever-more oppressive regime of uniformity.

In some respects this book is a sequel to my previous collection of essays Heimwee naar de mens (Nostalgia for Man, 2003). Here I repeat my search for the essence of our humanity. One of the foundations of this humanity is time, especially the experience of this “other” time. This is not a personal hobbyhorse, but a view shared and propagated by people working in various disciplines, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Politician Femke Halsema, for instance, has called for going slow, while filmmakers such as Jiska Rickels and Coco Schrijber make films about boredom and the deceleration of time and philosophers such as Jan Bor and Hans Achterhuis write books in which they explore this other dimension of time. [Note from ed: to be replaced with international figures for foreign editions] I lend my voice to this slowly swelling chorus by trying to formulate a philosophical or more existential motivation. But isn’t time too broad, too abstract and too complex a topic for a book? Doesn’t a book about time sidestep the urgent need to find answers to a whole host of concrete, socio-political questions, as outlined above? Can’t we simply slow down a little and make do with less, the way Halsema and others advocate? Surely we don’t need all these weighty analyses about another time ousted by the regime of clock time? I believe we do.

What philosophers such as Bergson and Bloch are trying to say is that the regime of economic clock time has displaced another experience of time. Bergson believes that this has resulted in man’s alienation from himself and even his loss of freedom; to Bloch this means nothing less than the loss of hope for change. But aren’t these just the alarmist views of philosophers who are overstating their case and who have lost all sense of reality? I don’t think so. If we take a good look around us and listen to the younger generation, the analyses by Bergson and Bloch seem irrefutable. In his book Boeiuh! Het stille protest van de jeugd (Yo! Young people’s silent protest, 2007), Rob Wijnberg describes the generation that has grown up in our accelerated culture as one devoid of all hope and idealism. He believes that people in their twenties and thirties today are characterized by indifference, apathy and dissatisfaction. A dialogue between Wijnberg and writer Adriaan van Dis in weekly newsmagazine De Groene Amsterdammer (May 2009) covers virtually all the characteristics of modern man predicted by Bergson and Bloch. Wijnberg says about his generation: “The passivity and indifference hide an intense dissatisfaction. We have turned our backs on current affairs and social issues, because we feel powerless. If there are any truths we don’t like we simply filter them out. We have become cynics.” In turn, Van Dis blames his generation for casually swapping social engagement and ideals for blatant consumerism. “We are completely mired in consumerism. With towering mortgage debts and our fat arses firmly in the driving seat we won’t give new-comers a chance. We live in a world of climate problems and terrorism, in a world without financial security. But people feel that everything is happening too fast. They cling to the past, to an invented self.”

Alienation, cynicism, indifference, acceleration, a lost sense of self and a life without any hope or belief in change – this is what the relentless assault of the economic clock has helped bring about. Going slow and consuming less is fairly pointless in my opinion unless it is accompanied by a fundamental overhaul of our approach to time and a thorough exploration of a potentially different experience of time. The point is to revive and hone our intuition for this other time in order to create a new and much-needed balance with clock time. Rather than choosing between one kind of time and another, we ought to restore the precarious balance between the two, so that people can find some respite every once in a while and stop yielding blindly to the demands of economic time. The clock and the wheels of capitalism and the economy, the subject of Chaplin’s razor-sharp analysis in 1936, constitute a reality that nobody can deny or dispense with. But as soon as this experience of time starts to dominate and infiltrate the internal time of reflection, creativity and humanity – blowing it up from within so to speak – things become hairy. So time is running out, party because clock time is exerting ever more control over us, and partly because this other time itself is gently prodding and encouraging us to explore new avenues.

Contents Time on our side

Preface. The Place that Time Forgot 9

Introduction. Time is Running Out 15

Sheltering the Soul. On boredom 29

Time as Duration. On Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time 39

Time Regained. Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf 69

A Secret Pact with Time. The music of Simeon ten Holt 93

Etruscan Time. Travel journal (1), summer 2008 107

Undine and the Time Whisperer. Time and utopia 133

Time as Hope. The ideas of Ernst Bloch 149

Longing for a Beginning. On Edmond Jabès: the writer in exile 171

More than Skin Deep. On the work of Margriet Luyten 183

Greek Time: the Future is Behind You. Travel journal (2) 195

Blowing Bubbles in Time. A meeting between Frederik van Eeden and Peter Sloterdijk 213

Timeless and Tragic. The work of Mark Rothko 231

Time and Brain. Can computers think? 247

Epilogue 265

Index of names 267