Time and Reality - Special Episode
The Eddy Network Podcast Episode 232
Thoughts in the night reflecting upon time and reality.
Some of the quotes on time from my reading.
William Shakespeare - Macbeth
Act 5, Scene 5, Macbeth says,
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
Burnt Norton
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
William Faulkner - The Sound and The Fury
Note: The book is four chapters each with a different narrator. Benjy, with the mind of a 3 year old. Quentin, oppressed by the past, Jason, obsessed with time, and, possibly, Dilsey, the African-American servant of the Compson family, who sees time as whole.
“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”
“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock 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.”
“…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”
“I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.”
“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
“Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”
“I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue ...”
“I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie.”
“and I temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was”
“As they walked through the bright noon, up the sandy road with the dispersing congregation talking easily again group to group, she continued to weep, unmindful of the talk.
"He sho a preacher, mon!! He didn't look like much at first, but hush!"
"He seed de power en de glory."
"Yes, suh. He seed hit. Face to face he seed hit."
Dilsey made no sound, her face did not quiver as the tears took their sunken and devious courses, walking with her head up, making no effort to dry them away even.
"Whyn't you quit dat, mammy?" Frony said. "Wid all dese people lookin. We be passin white folks soon."
"I've seed de first en de last," Dilsey said. "Never you mind me."
"First en last whut?" Frony said.
"Never you mind," Dilsey said. "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”