Dædalus coming up in Dædalus: Dædalus

on secularism Nikki Keddie, Martin E. Marty, James Carroll, Henry Munson, & religion Azzam Tamimi, M. Hakan Yavuz, T. N. Madan, Akeel Bilgrami, Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Vali Nasr, John L. Esposito, Jose Casanova, Heba Raouf Ezzat, Spring 2003 Jean Bethke Elshtain, William Galston, Christopher Hitchens, and others Spring 2003: on time

on science Alan Lightman, Gerald Holton, Susan Haack, David Pingree, on time D. Graham Burnett Mapping time 5 Peter Pesic, Peter Wolynes, and Robert Schimke David S. Landes Clocks & the wealth of nations 20 Michael Rosbash A biological clock 27 on learning Alison Gopnik, Howard Gardner, Jerome Bruner, Susan Carey, Thomas Gold The physics of past & future 37 Elizabeth Spelke, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Povinelli, Clark Peter L. Galison & Glymour, and Michael Tomasello D. Graham Burnett Einstein, Poincaré & modernity 41 Jennifer M. Groh & on happiness Martin E. P. Seligman, Richard A. Easterlin, Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael S. Gazzaniga How the brain keeps time 56 Anna Wierzbicka, Bernard Reginster, Robert H. Frank, Julia E. Danielle S. Allen How the Greeks kept time 62 Annas, Darrin M. McMahon, and Ed Diener Anthony Grafton Dating history 74 J. Hillis Miller Time in literature 86 on progress Joseph Stiglitz, John Gray, Charles Larmore, Randall Kennedy, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jagdish Bhagwati, Richard A. Shweder, and Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson Is time running out? others & Marco Verweij The case of global warming 98 Richard Fenn Time’s up: the apocalyptic imagination 108 on human nature Steven Pinker, Bernard Williams, Lorraine Daston, Jerome Kagan, Vernon Smith, Joyce Appleby, Patrick Bateson, Thomas Sowell, poetry Susan Howe from Bed Hangings ii 113 Jonathan Haidt, Richard Wrangham, Donald Brown, and others ½ction Rick Moody Fish Story 118 plus poetry by Lucie Brock-Broido, Les Murray &c.; ½ction by Lee K. Abbott, Joanna Scott &c.; and notes by Nathan Glazer, Robert notes Bernard McGinn on mysticism & art 131 C. Post, Michael Traynor, Jennifer Hochschild, Perez Zagorin, Yi-Fu Tuan on human geography 134 Gerald Early, Daniel Schorr &c.

U.S. $13/Canada $16 www.amacad.org

Inside front cover: Charles-Guillaume Manière achieved the distinction of maître horloger in 1778, though this striking masterpiece (now the property of the English Crown) dates from the early nineteenth century. The present moment is indicated by the point of the scythe on the globe clock. The knife-edge confrontation between a scythe-wielding father time and a muse, madly at work, who gives him pause, seems to suggest a sculptural invocation of the classical theme ars longa vita brevis. See David S. Landes on Clocks & the wealth of nations, pages 20–26. Photograph from The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ii. James Miller, Editor of Dædalus

Phyllis S. Bendell, Managing Editor and Director of Publications

Janet Foxman, Assistant Editor

D. Graham Burnett, Consulting Editor

Board of editors

Steven Marcus, Editor of the Academy

Russell Banks, Fiction Adviser

Rosanna Warren, Poetry Adviser

Joyce Appleby (u.s. history, ucla), Stanley Hoffmann (government, Harvard), Donald Kennedy (environmental science, Stanford), Martha C. Nussbaum (law and philosophy, Chicago), Neil J. Smelser (sociology, Berkeley), Steven Weinberg (physics, University of Texas–Austin); ex of½cio: Patricia Meyer Spacks (President of the Academy), Leslie Cohen Berlowitz (Executive Of½cer)

Editorial advisers

Daniel Bell (sociology, Harvard), Michael Boudin (law, u.s. Court of Appeals), Wendy Doniger (religion, Chicago), Howard Gardner (education, Harvard), Clifford Geertz (anthropology, Institute for Advanced Study), Carol Gluck (Asian history, Columbia), Stephen Greenblatt (English, Harvard), Thomas Laqueur (European history, Berkeley), Alan Lightman (English and physics, mit), Steven Pinker (neuroscience, mit), Diane Ravitch (education, nyu), Richard Shweder (human development, Chicago), Frank Wilczek (physics, mit)

Dædalus is designed by Alvin Eisenman Dædalus

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Design for the hedge maze is by Johan Vredeman de Vries, from Hortorum viridariorumque elegantes et multiplicis artis normam affabre delineatae (Cologne, 1615).

Dædalus was founded in 1955 and established as a quarterly in 1958. The journal’s namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles. Its emblem, a maze seen from above, symbolizes the aspiration of its founders to “lift each of us above his cell in the labyrinth of learning in order that he may see the entire structure as if from above, where each separate part loses its comfortable separateness.” The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, like its journal, brings together distinguished individuals from every ½eld of human endeavor. It was chartered in 1780 as a forum “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Now in its third century, the Academy, with its more than four thousand elected members, continues to provide intellectual leadership to meet the critical challenges facing our world. Dædalus Spring 2003 Dædalus publishes by invitation only, and as- Issued as Volume 132, Number 2 sumes no responsibility for unsolicited manu- scripts. The views expressed are those of the © 2003 by the American Academy author of each article, and not necessarily of of Arts & Sciences. the American Academy of Arts &Sciences. Mapping time: chronometry on top of the world © 2003 by D. Graham Burnett All subscription orders, single-copy orders, and Einstein, Poincaré & modernity: a conversation change-of-address information must be sent in © 2003 by Peter L. Galison and D. Graham writing to the Dædalus Business Of½ce, 136 Irv- Burnett ing Street, Suite 100, Cambridge ma 02138. from “Bed Hangings ii” © 2003 by Susan Howe Periodicals postage paid at Boston ma, and at Fish Story additional mailing of½ces. © 2003 by Rick Moody Postmaster: Send address changes to Dædalus, 136 Irving Street, Suite 100, Library of Congress Catalog No. 12-30299 Cambridge ma 02138, u.s.a. isbn 0-87724-038-8 If you wish to reprint an article from Dædalus gst number: 14034 3229 rt in another publication or to reproduce an arti- cle for classroom or other use, please send a Editorial of½ces: Dædalus, Norton’s Woods, written request to: Permissions Manager, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge ma 02138. Dædalus, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge ma Phone: 617 491 2600. Fax: 617 576 5088. 02138. Permission can be granted in most Email: [email protected]. cases; charges vary according to use of the Dædalus (issn 0011-5266) is published quar- copyrighted materials. If you have any ques- terly by the American Academy of Arts & Sci- tions, call 617 491 2600 and speak to the per- ences. u.s. subscription rates: individuals– missions manager. $40; institutions–$80. Canadian subscription Printed in the United States of America by rates: individuals–$43; institutions–$86. For- Cadmus Professional Communications, eign subscription rates: individuals–$60; in- Science Press Division, 300 West Chestnut stitutions–$100. Replacement copies for dam- Street, Ephrata pa 17522. aged or misrouted issues will be sent free of charge up to six months from the date of origi- The typeface is Cycles, designed by Sumner nal publication. Thereafter back copies are Stone at the Stone Type Foundry of Guinda available for the current cover price plus post- ca. Each size of Cycles has been separately age and handling. designed in the tradition of metal types. Newsstand distribution by Ingram Periodicals Inc., 1240 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne tn 37086; Telephone: 800 627 6247. D. Graham Burnett

Mapping time: chronometry on top of the world

At dawn on the 9th of June, 1873, the had more than comfort on his mind: the sturdy Victorian ocean naturalist C. Wy- belly of Bermuda, he believed, secreted a ville Thomson swung his elegantly rare device–a kind of earth clock, an bearded person down from the deck of hourglass for planetary time. the British research vessel Challenger, For it happened that more than ½fty berthed in the Bermuda dockyards, and years earlier, the commanding of½cer of made his way aboard a diminutive steam the North American and West Indian pinnace for a day trip on the island. After station, Sir David Milne, had spent sev- churning around to Mount Langton to eral days in Walsingham indulging his pick up the governor, the shore party of petrological curiosity by carefully sever- collectors and dignitaries (with a ‘native ing an eleven-foot stalagmite from its ½sherman’ in tow as guide and a photog- moorings on the cave floor, and arrang- rapher along in the service of posterity) ing for it to be returned to the British made for Harrington Sound, rowed Isles–yet another strange fruit plucked ashore, and hiked up to the Walsingham from the colonial periphery to be en- Caves for an afternoon of learned spe- joyed in metropolitan institutions of lunking in the deep and winding lime- philosophical cultivation. This calcare- stone caverns. The cool reaches of this ous obelisk had thus found its way to a geological attraction would provide wel- new, cool, dark cave across the Atlantic come respite from the midday tropical –the Museum of the University of Edin- sun, to be sure, but Wyville Thomson burgh, where Thomson (the Regius Pro- fessor of Natural History) would later ponder its bulk and consider the manner D. Graham Burnett is an assistant professor of and pace of its formation. Between 1819 history in the Program in History of Science at and 1873 such ponderings had grown ur- Princeton University. He writes on geography and gent, since the age of the earth had burst natural history, with an emphasis on the connec- into one of the most contested questions tions between science and imperialism. He is the in science. Genesis, evolution, Darwin, author of “Masters of All They Surveyed” even thermodynamics lay in the balance. (2000) and “A Trial By Jury” (2001), and a co- So it is perhaps less strange to learn that editor of “The History of Cartography” (1987–). in 1863, four years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Wals- © 2003 by D. Graham Burnett ingham Caves saw the visit of another

Dædalus Spring 2003 5 D. Graham pith-helmeted colonial administrator, a permanent record of the present con- Burnett on Sir Alexander Milne, who, acceding nep- dition of the stump of the stalagmite, time otistically to his father’s post in the West and we twice tried to photograph it,” but Indies, made a pilgrimage to his stump the conditions foiled the photographer, as well, the better to follow in his foot- and spoiled his exposures. steps, and to report on the passage of Thomson, however, would not be de- time. There, on his elbows and knees, nied: “It then occurred to us that it pocket watch in hand, Milne junior might be possible to take another slice timed the soft splats falling from the from the column, showing the amount ceiling of the cave and landing on ½ve of reparation during half a century, as an separate points where the stalagmite had accessory and complement to the Edin- once been. One drip fell at the rate of burgh specimen.” Hammers and chisels ½ve drops a minute, he reported, another again went to work in Walsingham, with between three and four, the rest slower the aim of producing yet another crate still. He identi½ed two new knoblets that for the Edinburgh Museum; another had come into being over the interven- crate, containing yet another piece in the ing forty-four years, along with a little jigsaw puzzle of time.1 mineral slick to one side–a total of ½ve cubic inches of matter. It was Alexander There is something strangely com- Milne’s brother David, back in Scotland, pelling, I think, about this crate. Grant- who did the math, and decided that at ed, it would solve none of the pressing this rate their father’s three-and-a-half- chronoscienti½c questions of the day. It ton prize represented something like six would not help sort out if Lord Kelvin’s hundred thousand years of subterranean much reduced timescale for the forma- accumulation. tion of the earth (grounded in his phy- To this same site, then, came Wyville sics of cooling bodies) was right, and it Thomson and his party the following de- would not settle heated disputes among cade, and they also drew their watches in geologists and paleontologists about the the lantern light: “The two drops were dating of cave remains. In fact, it is not still falling,” Thomson reported, “but even clear (to me, anyway) that this apparently somewhat more slowly, one crate ever made its way to the museum not quite three times in a minute, the in Edinburgh; it may have, but it may other twice.” The three other drips con- also have wound up forgotten on the tinued to feed their little slick deposit, docks in Bermuda, or in the of½ce of the though the party “could not determine superintendent of the shipyard, Captain that the bulk of the new accumulation Aplin, who arranged for the stonecutting was perceptibly greater than when it was tools and the men to wield them. measured by Sir Alexander Milne.” If But this slice of lost stalagmite merits this geochronometer was ever to be of a moment’s thought nevertheless. For real use, what Thomson needed was here was a specimen chosen for what it some more de½nite record of the current might tell about the timeline of the plan- form and magnitude of the lumps. Out et’s history, the sequential ages of geo- came the photographer’s equipment, logical time; chosen because it was the and the blue-white brilliance of burning magnesium made the Walsingham 1 The story of the Walsingham stalagmite can Caves, briefly, brighter than a Bermuda be found in C. Wyville Thomson, Voyage of the noon. But Thomson despaired: “We ‘Challenger,’ Volume I: The Atlantic (London: were very anxious to carry away with us Macmillan and Co., 1877), 322–328. 6 Dædalus Spring 2003 frozen stuff of a chthonic water clock strains to trample every social form? Mapping dripping in a smooth quartz bowl of And what to make, then, of a physicist time middle earth. And yet, this small artifact like Thomas Gold, who reminds us that of the relentless passage of timeline time without the particular con½gurations of was something quite different too, since, astrophysics, it is not clear that time keystone-like, it served to close a set of would exist at all? Or of a biologist like looping arches that spanned space and Michael Rosbash, who points out that if time: falling into place, it promised to several of our deep biochemical path- close the gaps between geological time ways were slightly different, it is not and human time, between 1819 and 1873, clear we would miss it? between Milne père and Milne ½ls, be- Do these pieces ½t? The reader must tween now and then, Edinburgh and turn them in the mind to ½nd reflecting Bermuda, here and there, metropolis facets, to hold them together, to measure and colony. The scienti½c investigation the remainder. of linear time cut a divot in the floor of the Walsingham cave, but the redoubled Let me add a piece myself. In an inter- scar in the stone powerfully symbolizes view published in the early 1990s, the how the workings of human memory French philosopher Michel Serres of- continuously tangle that timeline time fered a striking parable for the timescape into a knotty skein–producing folds, of modernity, a story about the collec- juxtapositions, curious singularities. tive conception of time that shapes our The crate contained another piece in sense of who we are. Gesturing at the the jigsaw puzzle of time. But did the history of cartography, Serres recalled piece ½t? I imagine the stalagmite-in- the quirky world maps of the medieval exile reunited with this now rootless period. These geometrical disks strike sliver of its trunk. The fragments do not the modern viewer as wholly fantastical, ½t, of course. There is a remainder, a cal- since they gathered up the known world careous accretion that holds them apart. and arranged it with care around a pow- Is there a lesson in this? Perhaps. We set erful centering point: Jerusalem. We out, at great effort, again and again, to laugh, Serres pointed out, at this and put the pieces of time together; but time every other ancient cosmography that itself, it seems, forever holds those tried to place humanity in the heart, pieces apart. middle, and origin of everything. And yet, he went on to argue mischievously, This issue of Dædalus draws together a are we not the victims of a comparably shipload of pieces in the puzzle of time. narcissistic delusion? If Mercator and From Heraclitus to Einstein, from Faulk- Copernicus dramatized that human in- ner to ½fteenth-century Namibia, from stitutions are not at the center of space, cognitive science to the apocalypse, the deep cognitive structures of moder- these ten essays invite reflection on what nity have offered us a consolation of time is and what it has meant and still considerable power: now, at this mo- means. Does the origin of time lie in lan- ment, we are continuously reassured, we guage, as J. Hillis Miller suggests in stand at the summit of time. “Time in literature”? Or could we say, The idea of progress makes us this with Danielle Allen, that time–a condi- guarantee. As Serres put it, “we conceive tion of possibility for human justice–is of time as an irreversible line, whether born of the need to put both halter and interrupted or continuous, of acquisi- yoke on anger, the furious beast that tions and inventions.” And therefore, Dædalus Spring 2003 7 D. Graham continuously abreast of the past, “it fol- cal way. This story is much more than a Burnett on lows that we are always right, for the forgotten episode in the history of ec- time simple, banal, and naïve reason that we centric learning, since it is, in the end, a are living in the present moment.” From watershed moment in the creation of our vantage point at the center of this history itself, both history as a practice, temporal mappamundi we can survey his- and history as a product of this practice. tory, secure in the knowledge that we are As Renaissance chronologers like Scal- not only right, but “righter than was iger organized antiquity along the axis of ever possible before.”2 Moreover, we are time, they were putting the presiding au- guaranteed always to occupy this envi- thorities of the classical tradition in the able seat, since each moment simply lifts past. It was not a simple business, but us higher over all that has come before. here, surely, was the hill of time abuild- By these lights, if one dreams Serres’s ing, and men scrambling to the top, even strange dream for a moment, our domi- as they heaped the dirt under their feet. nant theories of knowledge–our ac- If it was these early practitioners of a counts of how we know we are right in ‘science of time’ who served as archi- politics and in science; our sense that tects, builders, and earliest summiteers our truths are the best truths–suddenly of the hill of time, it was the robed seem to be dependent on a very particu- claque of professional historians who lar (even peculiar) cartography of time. became its surveyors, custodians, and Who made time into the hill we are al- dedicated gardeners. And in this club the ways atop? Will those who come after historians of science and technology someday look back at us–secure in our have long held a special place where the sense of being forever astride our yester- problem of progress is concerned. For days–and laugh, just as we are tempted theirs was an enterprise, at least in its to chuckle at a mappamundi with the Old inception, exactly dedicated to showing Temple at its navel? It is a puzzling just how high the hill had grown, an en- thought. terprise that could dramatize temporal Who made time into the hill we are progress, stage by stage, in a pageant of always atop? This is a deep and dif½cult new truths overcoming old errors on the question, and reasonable thinkers have way to the present. These historians lain the idea of progress on different might have walked down the hill, but doorsteps. Anthony Grafton’s essay in they did so in order to show the colorful this volume, “Dating history,” takes up and treacherous path back up to the this very issue, and reminds us that even Olympian heights of modernity. as those old to maps were being re- If the ½eld of the history of science has placed by the cartographies of Mercator changed in the last decades, many of its and Johann Schott, a similarly revolu- most satisfying narratives still hail from tionary project–technical chronology this era of the mountaineers. One of the –was rearranging the temporal frame- very best stories they brought up the work of the universe in an equally radi- slopes was the story of timekeeping it- self. This was a story of progress if there 2 The interview was published in English as ever was one–perhaps the ultimate tale Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations of how humanity had literally ‘climbed on Science, Culture and Time, trans. by Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michi- the hill of time.’ And a compelling story gan Press, 1995). For the section on modern it remains: Once upon a time, human conceptions of time, see pages 48–51. beings reasoned the passage of time by

8 Dædalus Spring 2003 the loose organic cycles of the years, the bles like a leaf”). Suf½ce it to say that the Mapping seasons, the moons, and the days. Time swinging arms of the foliot beat no natu- time was the passage of the sun in the sky: a ral pulse. sweep each day, a seesaw procession But the basic structure of the mechani- each year. The invention of timekeeping cal clockwork had been de½ned, and devices–hourglasses, water clocks, medieval towns vied for glory in the graduated tapers–made it possible for erection of public clocks, the better sort early civilized people to begin to control of which showed the paths of the planets and standardize the units of time, and in on their dials and sounded the hours on doing so to coordinate their lives. But giant bells. The very gaudiest set those the great step came sometime around bells ringing with the hammer strike of the turn to the fourteenth century–say, well oiled jack-work automatons, which between 1270 and 1330–when someone creaked into action in elaborate mechan- (we can’t say who!) somewhere (in Eu- ical masques. Many of these clocks sur- rope, we think, but we can’t say where!) vive, jacks intact, but few retain their hit upon the ticking heart of a true me- original escapements, since those were chanical clock. This heart, called an ‘es- upgraded long ago: in the seventeenth capement,’ consists of a clever arrange- century, thanks to the work of Galileo ment of swinging paddles set beside a (and Christian Huygens), the verge and toothed wheel shaped like a crown. The foliot met its demise; and those same wheel would like to spin free, driven by a paddles that kicked the slowly turning falling weight, but the weight cannot fall wheel of time into a regular beat found free (and the wheel cannot simply spin) their way onto the shaft of a pendulum, because those deftly balanced paddles whose swings gave a new rhythm to the kick the wheel’s teeth, stopping it for a mechanical timekeeper. Within a few moment, before letting it go–but just years, the error of the best mechanical for a moment, only to stop it again: timekeepers went from something like block, unblock, and block again; block, twenty minutes a day, to something clos- unblock, block. Instead of the weight er to twenty seconds. dropping to the floor in a whir, it lowers The effect was profound, since these itself by tiny steps: tick, tock, tick, tock; new devices were precise enough to re- and the wheel turns, slow as the plod- veal in detail curious irregularities in the ding of the seconds. natural cycles of earthly and celestial Not that those seconds were all exactly time. Take the ‘day,’ for instance. One alike, at least not at ½rst. The earliest might think that the period of time from mechanical clocks swung those precious noon to noon marks an unchanging paddles with a certain erratic charm, unit; more light in the summer, more since the paddles were af½xed to the axis dark in the winter, but always in sum the of a T-shaped bar called a verge and foliot. same period. An astronomer will tell you The name itself suggests that the device different. By the seventeenth century could not be made to behave with per- this and other quirks of the natural order fect regularity: etymologies offered for could be measured and plotted with con- the term ‘foliot’ have suggested that it siderable accuracy. hails from the root word for ‘lunatic’ or ‘madwoman’ (as in, “the thing swings A remarkable thing had happened. A back and forth like a nut”), or perhaps device that had started out as a mechani- from the word for ‘leaf’ (as in, “it trem- cal model of day and night, and hence of

Dædalus Spring 2003 9 D. Graham the relationship between the earth and new areas of geometry (and physics) by Burnett on the sun (for this is what the hands of a watching those same springs, swings, time clock really are–a model of the dynam- and cogs.3 Head and hand met in the ics of earth and sun), had gradually out- backrooms of the clockmaker’s shop, at stripped its original: new sundials had to the bench and the forge. be equipped with correction tables, al- Meanwhile, outdoor types made their lowing the user to convert shadow time own use of these powerful new devices. to clock time, this newly abstract and Carefully cased and padded, such ‘regu- unworldly ticking. It is no exaggeration lators’ made their way around the world to say that human beings suddenly with the naturalist voyagers of Enlight- found themselves correcting the sun–a enment learning, revealing strange small correction to be sure (never more things as they went. For instance, even than a few minutes), but one with large the best clocks seemed to run at slightly implications. For ticking there on the different speeds in different places on wall was a product of human ingenuity the planet. These worrying observations that had, in a sense, surpassed the heav- would lead natural philosophers to re- ens. It is as if the shadows on the wall of vise their understanding of the shape of Plato’s cave reached back to nudge the the earth, and the forces that gave it source of light and truth back into place; form. as if Phaëthon took up the reins and Nor was that all. As David Landes drove the chariot better than Apollo. The points out in his essay in this collection, relationship between the celestial realm “Clocks and the wealth of nations,” a and mechanical art, between heaven and new type of highly resilient (and breath- earth, would never be the same. takingly accurate) timekeeper–the true A clock that could be used in these ‘chronometer,’ developed in the late ways was a scienti½c instrument, an es- eighteenth century–would up the ante sential tool of the cosmos-encompassing of mechanical magic even as it provided astronomical researches of the seven- a handy solution to the oldest problem teenth and eighteenth centuries. Indoor in navigation and cartography: the lon- types tinkered with the mathematics gitude.4 These newly compact instru- that described such ½ne devices and ments could ride out a six-week voyage their workings: if in the mid-sixteenth- slopping on the high seas while main- century clock craftsmen had worked out taining time to within a second or two a the curve representing the force of an day: accuracies of 99.999 percent and unwinding spring, they did so not with better. They were, in their day, the most graph paper or numbers, but rather with otherworldly devices ever made by the ½les and wooden blocks, as they shaped hand of man. Otherworldly in a very real the cone-shaped cog (called a fusée) that sense: each was its own little autono- compensated for the uneven driving power of the earliest spring clocks. That 3 See, for example, Michael Mahoney, “Huy- gens and the Pendulum: From Device to Math- cog was nothing less than the rei½cation ematical Relation,” in E. Grosholz and H. Bre- of a sophisticated dynamical analysis. ger, eds., The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge But by the seventeenth century, as the (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, historian of mathematics Michael Ma- 2000), 17–39. honey has shown, clockmaking mathe- 4 For a brief description of how a clock makes maticians were actually doing that anal- it possible to measure longitude, see page 45 in ysis on paper, and discovering whole this issue.

10 Dædalus Spring 2003 mous world, a universe to itself. This nometer, K1–back on board the ship– Mapping fact was not lost on the English mechan- stopped ticking forever, in a mystical time ical genius John Harrison, who ½rst manifestation of mechanical sympathy. pushed chronometrical precision into Such a braiding of machines and men, this ethereal realm. For decades he meaning and mensuration, should not labored to produce a clockwork that surprise us. For even as timekeeping pre- would be impervious to the vicissitudes cision climbed the curve of progress to of the swirling world of dirt and change: an asymptotic plateau beyond the soil, his devices would continuously compen- sun, and stars, the devices that per- sate for every perturbation in the condi- formed these feats remained potent tions of this fallen, messy planet– worldly objects. After all, as Peter Gali- swings in temperature, in pressure, in son reminds us in this volume, there is orientation. Regarding his creation, after eternally a propinquity between things enumerating its ½ne balances and count- and thoughts, and the clock was a peren- less defenses, he was moved to declare: nial philosophical machine, a machine “In short, it is a little world of itself, in- to think, as much as it was a machine to dependent of the difference of gravity, use. Those verge and foliot medieval heat, or cold of this our Globe.”5 clocks did more than tell the time of ves- A world of itself. It is a tempting idea. pers in the village or merely toll the An idea consistent with that powerful working hours out into the ½elds; they narrative in the historiography of time provided a new way to think about what science: the story of how time ‘left the nature was and how it worked. If that earth’ in the march to modernity. Once elaborate tower clock could coordinate upon a time, sun and season, heat and the swinging motions of the planets and cold were not obstacles to time-telling, stars on its baroque dials, what made us they were exactly the way that people rea- sure that a similar clockwork was not be- soned what the time was. The medieval hind the swinging of the originals, out peasant watched for hoarfrost and night there, moving against the black sky? herons; but Captain Cook, aboard the Newton wondered as much. And what Resolution, peered into a gimbaled box, about that mechanical jack, hammering which, inured to heat and cold, place the bell? If it walked like a duck and and position, simply told the time, a talked like a duck, what made it not a world unto itself. duck? Or what made a duck something But of course, in another sense, such other than a particularly intricate jack- devices could never leave the world; on work? Viscount Bolingbroke may have the contrary, they stayed right here doubted–wryly, with patrician comfort among us, and transformed it. Their aus- –that his villagers would ever confuse tere and independent workings were in- the parish clock with the town bull, but scribed with human signi½cance at every Descartes, listening to his cat squeak like tick. Not least aboard the Resolution: it a wagon wheel, was not so sure. became immortal legend that when Such musings touched the heavens. Cook fell dead in the Hawaiian surf on Was God, in the end, perhaps the ½nest February 14, 1779, his faithful chro- watchmaker of all? A clockwork nature called for a clockwork natural theology, 5 Quoted on page 217 of William J. H. An- drewes, “Even Newton Could be Wrong,” in a notion still vigorous (and contested) in Andrewes, ed., The Quest for Longitude (Cam- the nineteenth century, when the cele- bridge, Mass.: Collection of Historical Scien- brated Anglican divine William Paley ti½c Instruments, Harvard University, 1996).

Dædalus Spring 2003 11 D. Graham opened his treatise on God and Man fallen-on-hard-times branch of a large Burnett on with a clockwork encounter: He asked and distinguished Virginia family, time his readers to imagine a sojourner upon Maury decided as a boy to cast his mea- a heath who, walking through the empti- ger bread upon the waters, joining the ness, stubs his toe on a pocket watch. nascent U.S. Navy in 1825, at the age of From this encounter, Paley assures us, nineteen. Largely an autodidact, Maury our solitary walker could be sure of one rose to be the ½rst superintendent of the thing: a man–a thinking being–has U.S. Naval Observatory, and is often re- been this way. And yet, Paley went on to membered now as the ‘founder of ocean- suggest, we stub our toes on rocks, twigs, ography.’ As a midshipman and naviga- and turtles in any ½eld. Can we not, tor plying the seas in naval and merchant looking at these, be absolutely certain vessels in the ½rst decades of the nine- that some ½ne intelligence passed this teenth century, Maury had much contact way before us? Otherwise, who made with the new technologies of timekeep- these ‘works’? Moreover, does the turtle ing at sea. Later, in the midcentury, as he not surpass the watch (in complexity put his hand to the defense of a new kind and craftsmanship) by precisely that of sea science, he reached for the chro- measure that the Divine Arti½cer sur- nometer as a way to make sense of the passes man? oceans. And his visionary “Physical In these ways and many more, the Geography of the Sea” needed chronom- clock–the concrete referent in the dom- eters as both practical and conceptual inant metaphor of a ‘clockwork uni- tools. Practically, Maury’s sea science verse’–served as a potent conceptual depended on an extended network of tool for thinking about the workings of global informants, continuously making nature, even as it was also a powerful and reporting observations about the practical tool for investigating those physical conditions of wind and water same workings. And none of this was throughout the world’s oceans. As the static. As the actual clocks changed century unfolded, chronometrical navi- through time (gaining new parts and gation would make such a system viable, new capabilities) the elaborations and since it enabled observers reliably to cor- implications of the clockwork metaphor relate their data with speci½c sites on the changed in step: new bits of clocks, like trackless wastes of the sea. Plotted to the compensator or the precision- their chronometer-derived coordinates, enhancing remontoir, offered new dimen- these data would make the earliest large- sions for thinking about the (clockwork) scale oceanographic models possible. universe, in much the same way that in Standard histories of oceanography sel- our own day–as Jennifer Groh and Mi- dom fail to acknowledge the ½eld’s debt chael Gazzaniga show in their essay to the chronometer. here–new developments in computing But Maury needed the chronometer as have implications for how we think more than an instrument. A true sea sci- about our (computer-like?) brains. ence demanded a sea that had an inner order that could be revealed–a sea of To see this dynamic at work, take, for patterns and workings, a rational sea, instance, the nineteenth-century earth not a sea of unformed chaos and opaque science of the American naval astron- looming. A real sea science therefore omer and hydrographic innovator Mat- called for nothing less than a conceptual thew Fontaine Maury. Hailing from the reinvention of the sea itself, traditionally

12 Dædalus Spring 2003 a brooding brew of mystery, moodiness, ut there may be a deeper point here as Mapping B time and fearsome unpredictability. Against well. The chronometrical sea was, above these notions Maury repeatedly invoked all and crucially, a rational sea. Human a “clockwork ocean,” whose inner work- efforts to conceive the workings of the ings were as regular and reliable as those sky–the original ‘rational’ phenomena of a great blue chronometer. Waves and presented by nature–yielded the earliest cycles of salinity were, as he put it, clocks, and in time re½ned clocks made “balance-wheels” in the mechanism, as it possible to reconceive the sea–long was the equatorial cloud ring, which invoked as the consummately ‘irra- “like the balance-wheel of a well-con- tional’ face of nature–as a sky-like structed chronometer, affords the grand place: a formal system that would yield atmospherical machine the most exquis- to metrical and mathematical analysis. A itely arranged self-compensation”; the sea that behaved like a clock was a sea Antarctic served as a “regulator” in the amenable to science. A chronometrical thermodynamics of oceanic currents; sea was a rational sea, a sea of ratios, a and, expanding the clockwork analogy, sea ready to come under a mathesis univer- he argued that the Gulf Stream “acts like salis. Here Maury’s chronometrical sea a pendulum, slowly propelled by heat on science intimates the degree to which the one side, and repelled by cold on the the chronometer had come, in the Victo- other.” “In this view,” he continued, “it rian age, to embody nothing less than becomes a chronograph for the sea, rationality itself. keeping time for its inhabitants, and Was the chronometer a Victorian ‘the- marking the seasons for the great ory machine’? A way to think about whales; and there it has been for all time thinking and being in the nineteenth vibrating to and fro, once every year, a century? The argument can be made. In great self-regulating, self-compensating January of 1841 another hard-luck young liquid pendulum.” Pushing beyond the man of good breeding took passage to waters, Maury went so far as to suggest the Paci½c to try a life at sea. By the time that the sea was itself nothing less than the youthful Herman Melville signed on the main driver in the whole geophysical for a sperm-whale cruise aboard the clockwork of sea, land, and air. For those Acushnet, Maury had given up life on the who took up this new study, Maury decks for life at the desk, but the two promised, “the sea, with its physical men had more in common than youthful geography, becomes as the main-spring wanderlust: Melville’s cousin Thomas of a watch; its waters, and its currents, had been Maury’s shipmate aboard the and its salts, and its inhabitants, with U.S.S. Vincennes in 1827–1830, on a voy- their adaptations, as balance-wheels, age across the Paci½c that stopped in the cogs, and pinions, and jewels in the ter- Marquesas and included a junket on restrial mechanism.” Maury’s rich lan- wild and seductive Nukuhiva Island, guage, his meticulous elaboration of the where Herman would later jump ship. metaphor, suggests how, in the nine- Maury’s older brother, John, as it hap- teenth century, new clocks facilitated pened, had lived for almost two years as new thinking as well as new doing.6 a beachcomber on Nukuhiva all the way back in 1812. On his visit there in 1829, 6 Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geog- raphy of the Sea, ed. John Leighly (Cambridge, 347, and 70; for a lengthy discussion of com- Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963 [1861]). pensators in the “clock-work of the ocean” see In order, I refer to pages 212, 224, 423, 260, 403, also page 240.

Dædalus Spring 2003 13 D. Graham young Maury was searching for evidence chant and navy vessels embarking on Burnett on of his brother’s stay; Thomas could not global voyages would set their chro- time know then that his cousin Herman nometers by the daily fall of the ‘time- would give the island literary immortali- ball’ atop the Greenwich Observatory, ty in the novel Typee less than twenty which presided over the lower reach of years later. the Thames docklands–Plinlimmon Like Maury, then, Melville spent his reimagines the divine soul (not merely youth in the chronometrical world of the body) as a clockwork device. Thus global navigation, and, strikingly, he too regulated to keep ‘God’s time,’ virtuous would place this new clockwork system spirits can make their way through the at the heart of his later writing. Book world and remain ‘true’ to a distant and XIV of his sprawling, cloying, and ½nally divine standard. They may require, as maddening Pierre, or The Ambiguities con- any chronometer would, periodic adjust- tains a half dozen of the most remark- ments, and–playing out the allegory in able pages ever written on timekeeping, technical detail–Plinlimmon suggests in the form of a fragmentary pamphlet they ought to be ‘rated’ so their particu- that falls into the hands of the novel’s lar behaviors can be continuously cor- eponymous hero. “Chronometricals and rected. But still, such souls can, with Horologicals,” authored by the shadowy attention, emulate Christ, who “was a sage “Plotinus Plinlimmon,” offers a chronometer; and the most exquisitely worldly sermon on time, space, and the adjusted and exact one, and the least soul–a sermon that uses the chronome- affected by all terrestrial jarrings, of any ter as an instrument for nothing less that have ever come to us.” than the transvaluation of all values. At Moreover, like Christ, all ‘chronomet- the heart of this strange embedded nar- rical’ souls will ½nd themselves in the rative lies a cumbrous allegory. As Plin- same worldly bind: limmon puts it: Now in an arti½cial world like ours, the It seems to me, in my visions, that there soul of man is further removed from its is a certain most rare order of human God and Heavenly Truth, than the souls, which if carefully carried in the chronometer carried to China, is from body will almost always and everywhere Greenwich. And, as that chronometer, if give Heaven’s own truth, with some at all accurate, will pronounce it to be small grains of variance. For peculiarly 12 o’clock high-noon, when the China coming from God, the sole source of local watches say, perhaps, it is 12 that heavenly truth, and the great o’clock midnight; so the chronometri- Greenwich hill and tower from which cal soul, if in this world true to its great the universal meridians are far out into Greenwich in the other, will always, in in½nity reckoned; such souls seem as its so-called institutions of right and London sea-chronometers (Greek, time- wrong, be contradicting the mere local namers) which as the London ship standards and watch-maker’s brains of floats past Greenwich down the this earth. Thames, are accurately adjusted by To work from one’s chronometer is Greenwich time, and if heedfully kept, thus to be out of sync–usually ridicu- will still give that same time, even lously so–with the ‘horologicals,’ to be though carried to the Azores. out of sync with local norms and ways of Describing the actual process by which life. Only on the ½ne line of the prime world shipping was regulated–mer- meridian, on that “great Greenwich hill 14 Dædalus Spring 2003 and tower” of the celestial seat, will fectly arbitrary. Plinlimmon would seem Mapping chronometrical time be the ‘right time.’ to be offering a kind of antinomian ho- time Elsewhere, living by Greenwich time rology at worst, at best an unctuous will make a chronometrical soul “guilty pragmatism of local mores. of all manner of absurdities:–going to And yet, there is a suggestive promise bed at noon, say, when his neighbors that the conceit, if rightly understood, would be sitting down to dinner.” offers something more, perhaps some- At stake, ½nally, is nothing less than thing less bleak. As Plinlimmon hints, the very existence of absolute principles “And yet it follows not from this, that in moral life. Melville the beachcomber God’s truth is one thing and man’s truth –that amphibious sailor who had by another; but–as above hinted, and as this time already made his way inland on will be further elucidated in subsequent notorious Nukuhiva, and who, con- lectures–by their very contradictions fronting the terrifying ‘Typee,’ won- they are made to correspond.” dered how to reset his ethical ticker to a “By their very contradictions they are ‘savage’ local time–lets Plinlimmon made to correspond.” What can this play out the dark meaning of the lecture: gnomic conundrum possibly mean? Since the text in question is a fragment, In short, this Chronometrical and Horo- the reader of Pierre shuffles in vain for an logical conceit, in sum, seems to teach account of this reconciliation of opposi- this:–That in things terrestrial (horo- tions, this transcendental deduction. logical) a man must not be governed by Still, the vehicle of the allegory may car- ideas celestial (chronometrical). . . . A ry us to a solution: for to anyone familiar virtuous expediency, then, seems the with the actual operations of mid-nine- highest desirable or attainable earthly teenth-century navigation, it is a simple excellence for the mass of men, and is matter of geometry to make horological the only earthly excellence that their and chronometrical contradictions ‘cor- Creator intended for them. When they respond.’ That is to say, the difference go to heaven, it will be quite another between Greenwich time and local time thing. There, they can freely turn the is a way of orienting oneself in space, of left cheek, because there the right cheek knowing where one is, and how one is will never be smitten. There they can heading. Does Melville want us to think freely give all to the poor, for there there of moral principles in this way? As a will be no poor to give to. A due appreci- means to ½nd our way home? Is this, ation of this matter will do good to a ultimately, the function of the chrono- man. metrical soul?7 Here are the clocks and maps not of a From the natural theology of Paley’s physical relativity (that will come later wanderer and his watch, to the mean- with Einstein and Poincaré), but of an derings of Melville’s chronometrical equally radical ethical relativism. spirit, adrift on the high seas, the tech- If not something more extreme–since nologies of timekeeping ticked away in it cannot have been lost on an educated the heart of Victorian metaphysics and salt like Melville that every nation set its theology, even as they ticked in earnest chronometers to its own prime meridi- an: the French to Paris, the Spanish to 7In the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Pierre, “Chronometricals and Horologicals” San Fernando, the Americans to Wash- runs from pages 210–215. See Herman Melville, ington. Even the absolutes of those chro- Pierre, or The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, nological souls, by these lights, were per- Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Ev- Dædalus Spring 2003 15 D. Graham in the church towers of Victorian Bri- ful½lled its admiralty duty, charting the Burnett on tain. And as if in syncopated echo of South American coasts for the improve- time Plinlimmon’s tale, even those steeple ment of British shipping, while showing clocks did not tick together. As the rail- the Union Jack from Bahia to Valparaiso ways extended London time throughout and beyond. The Beagle and its countless England in the 1850s, a real chronometri- sister ships were chronometrical souls, cal schism split the isle: high church and they kept Greenwich time (and bells still rang local hours; the noncon- paraded Greenwich mores) in the horo- formist places of worship switched to logical Chinas and Nukuhivas of the Greenwich time. Chronometricals and expanding European empires. Horologicals indeed. But the geopolitics of timekeeping meant more than this. For even as those One reading of “Chronometricals and brass Frodsham and Arnold chronome- Horologicals” sees the tale as a parable ters helped bully colonial explorers keep of nineteenth-century theosophical track of where they were on sea and on chronometry. And this cannot be wrong. land (as they made their maps and used And yet, it is not clear that this reading is them), these same ticking devices helped enough. For one could begin again, at such men keep track of where they were the beginning, and survey the world in the history of civilization: they came from the top of time–from atop Mel- from atop the hill of time, and could ville’s “great Greenwich hill and tower.” show this to the feathered and benighted From here we can watch the sails open people of the horological realms by for the east, for China, Java, Africa, and opening a gimbaled mahogany box. India, places that are out there beyond Such scenes were the stock-in-trade of the sea, yes, but even more importantly, Victorian exploration. The French places that are not in our time: not in our gorilla-hunting swashbuckler Paul du time chronometrically speaking, to be Chaillu would write of how awed Afri- sure, as Melville reminds us; but not in cans contemplated his timekeeper in our time in a deeper way too, since in the wonder and amazement and decided colonial imagination the ‘out there’ was that it must be his “guardian spirit.” If almost always a ‘back then.’ In this sense his onlookers actually asserted some- London marked the prime meridian in a thing like this, they were, of course, not cultural cartography too–a global chro- far off. And such tales were legion. After nocultural geography. If there was a showing his watch and other instrumen- metaphysics of the chronometer in the tal accoutrements to the native people age of empire, might we not be obliged he met, the British explorer Lovett Cam- to acknowledge that there was a geopoli- eron quoted (ventriloquized?) their tics as well? ejaculations of Anglophilia: “Oh these This observation extends beyond the white men! They make all these wonder- straightforward fact that the clocks of ful things and know how to use them! the nineteenth century were tools for the Surely men who know so much ought creation of the maps of empire, though never to die!”8 they were emphatically that: Darwin’s Indeed, so they all hoped. And if they ship the Beagle carried no fewer than did not die under the tropical sun, they twenty-two chronometers aboard as it 8 Both stories are told in Michael Adas, Ma- anston and Chicago: Northwestern University chines as the Measure of Men (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor- Press and The Newberry Library, 1971). nell University Press, 1989), 159.

16 Dædalus Spring 2003 packed up and went back to the future, Recently, after presenting a lecture on Mapping whence they were increasingly sure they science and colonialism, I was ap- time had come. They left the past behind, in proached by a distinguished senior gen- Africa, the Amazon, and elsewhere– tleman who wanted me to explain why primeval places, ½lled with primeval the Chinese never had a scienti½c revo- peoples at different stages in the evolu- lution. This question–often known as tion of civilization. the Needham Problem, after the great These scenes of chronometrical en- Cambridge sinologist and Marxist histo- counter were by no means new to the rian of science, Joseph Needham–has nineteenth century. Mechanical time- long been the sixty-four-thousand-dollar keepers had served European voyagers question for the historian of science. If as a way to put themselves on the map in recent years developments in the his- culturally, long before such devices were toriography of the European ‘scienti½c adequate to put them on the map geo- revolution’ have somewhat put the ques- detically. Nowhere was this sort of time- tion aside (we are no longer so sure we keeping more important than in the know exactly what that revolution was, early-seventeenth-century encounters so it makes it tough to ask why the Chi- between the China of the Ming dynasty nese didn’t have one), it remains a hard and the Jesuit missionaries who set out problem on which much distinguished for Peking to convert the middle king- work has been done. I began to offer my dom. As Father Ricci liked to tell the questioner a sense of how one might go story, it was the promise of receiving a about answering his question, but he cut gift of ‘self-ringing bells’ that ½nally se- me off briskly. As it happened, he al- duced the reclusive emperor and gave ready knew the answer, and wanted to the brethren a way around the meddling tell me: “The Chinese emperor,” he ex- eunuchs of the imperial palace. The re- plained, “had this huge, locked closet sults entered the providential hagiogra- where he kept all the clocks of the king- phy of the order: the emperor, instantly dom, and he wouldn’t let anyone else see besotted with this ½ne new toy, obliged them or study them. He hoarded them his supercilious mathematicians to sit at because he was afraid of what the people the feet of these clever foreigners and to would do if they got any science.” learn the regulation and maintenance of Now this isn’t right. By the early eigh- this remarkable device. Soon thereafter, teenth century there was a proper trade he insisted upon having a clock with him in European timepieces through Canton, at all times, and within a year a section and by the 1820s a whole international of the Forbidden City was being remod- European subindustry had arisen, link- eled to accommodate a large tower ing London and Geneva, wholly for the clock. By 1730, a French missionary to purpose of supplying a distinctive kind the court would report that “The Imper- of watch to the burgeoning China ial Palace is stuffed with clocks. . . watch- trade.10 But my interlocutor was not to es, carillons, repeaters, organs, spheres and astronomical clocks of all kind and keeping and European encounters with China. description–there are more than four For an introduction see Chun-chieh Huang and thousand pieces from the best masters of Erik Zürcher, eds., Time and Space in Chinese Paris and London.”9 Culture (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).

9 Quoted in Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 10 This industry is discussed by David Landes, 1300–1700 (New York: Collins, 1967), 86. Revolution in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard There is a rich and detailed literature on time- Dædalus Spring 2003 17 D. Graham be budged: authoritarian tyranny and subtle movement back through the ages Burnett on technophobia had, as far as he was con- of humanity, this was the task of that time cerned, consigned China to the dustbin paradigmatic ½gure of Enlightenment of history. For him, they got stuck in the learning: the philosophical traveler. Middle Ages. For Fabian, then, modernity was born This view, which glosses over both the when the timeline time of Grafton’s history of timekeeping in China and a chronologers was spatialized into a vast, complex story of cross-cultural ex- globe-encompassing geochronocultural change, nevertheless has a long scholarly tableau, a concentric secular cosmology pedigree, one that can be traced right that gathered the peoples of the world back to some of those very eighteenth- into a new mappamundi with the great century Jesuits who attended at court in cities of Europe cast as the new Jeru- Beijing. Put aside its merits. Most strik- salem, the origin and apex of civiliza- ing is the way this view places the chro- tion, the only part of the planet that was nopolitics of modernity in high relief. actually modern. Here was a powerful For what does it mean to say that other new way to make sense of the flood of people, manifestly our contemporaries, discontinuous, fragmentary, and desta- are best understood as living in our bilizing evidence about human origins past? and human habits that was pouring into In an influential essay published in the learned societies of those cities. 1983, Time and the Other, the Dutch an- Here, for Fabian, was the birth of the thropologist Johannes Fabian undertook human sciences, particularly anthropol- a sweeping critique of precisely this tem- ogy, which grounded itself in this new poral cartography, which he called ‘allo- cosmology of modernity, grounded itself chrony.’ If Serres’s parable probed how in the original sin of hegemonic ambi- moderns came to think of themselves as tions, the “denial of coevalness.”11 perennially atop some abstract moun- That a map of time enabled travelers tain of time, Fabian would ask us to see to orient themselves and plot others that this mountain was quite literally throughout the age of empire–this, I mapped onto the globe in the age of think, cannot be denied. Whether, as European overseas adventuring. Lon- Fabian suggests, allochrony remains a don, Paris, Berlin–these metropolitan “vast entrenched political cosmology” centers were atop that hill, which is to such that contemporary geopolitics has say that they were in the present, but the its ideological foundation in, as he farther one went from downtown, the would have it, a “flawed chronopolitics” farther back in time one could venture. –this remains a contentious thesis, but From the ‘serfs’ of neighboring Ireland not an absurd one. Talk with some un- all the way to the ‘natural men’ and dergraduates about the non-Western (even better) ‘natural women’ of Tahiti. world and use a stopwatch to time how Out in space meant back in time. Read- long it takes before they invoke allo- ing movement in space was the job of a chrony as a way to make sense of others. navigator or geographer, but reading this Or, perhaps more tellingly, listen to the evening news.

University Press, 1983), 268. See also Catherine 11 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New Pagani, Eastern Magni½cence and European Inge- York: Columbia University Press, 1983). He nuity: Clocks of Late Imperial China (Ann Arbor: takes the eighteenth century to mark the instal- University of Michigan Press, 2001). lation of this idea; but the roots run deep.

18 Dædalus Spring 2003 Fabian considered his analysis an in- wound up to do battle on foreign shores. Mapping tervention in what he called “the scan- And one might build large closets for time dal of domination and exploitation.” He such troublesome devices. believed that he was revealing the ideol- ogy of time that had undergirded, and Deep in the Walsingham cave, in Ber- ½nally authorized, the attitudes and muda, watch in hand, as the native guide practices that led Europeans and their looked on, C. Wyville Thomson and his Creole descendents to claim, by the party tried to get to the bottom of time. opening of the twentieth century, terri- Pickaxes poised, they were ready to dig, torial sovereignty over some 85 percent if necessary, to get there. All the while, of the terrestrial globe. though, they knew exactly where they But does his observation add anything stood in history: they were men of sci- to the history of time’s science? That ence, from Victorian England; they had story of progressive precision, of ½ne set their chronometers at Greenwich, clockwork? That story that takes us that towering hill. Getting to the bottom from the rough-and-ready judicial water of time would only tell them what they clock in Athens to atomic clocks so fan- already knew: they stood at the leading tastically precise that they can reveal edge of knowledge, they were astride the changes in the speed of the spinning past. earth when the winds blow, and when Who made time the hill we are always the spring sap rises in the trees? atop? And who sold plots on the ter- Perhaps. For a long while (as Need- raced slopes to the people of the Carib- ham’s Problem suggests), scholars in the bean, to the Paci½c Islanders, to the history of science and technology have whole ‘family of man’? At what cost? been interested in the problem of Euro- I have sketched two stories in this es- pean exceptionalism. They have asked, say: one, the story of how, with clocks for instance, why the Chinese did not and rocks, human beings tried to get to immediately take up the larger astro- the bottom of time–to grasp, hold, and nomical and cosmological signi½cance show what it really was; the other, the of precision clockwork. What impedi- story of how, with maps and memory, mentary aspect of their culture or char- human beings managed to get to the top acter could be held responsible for the of time–to mound up the hill of the past way that they held these devices in the and summit it. Do these two stories ½t? realm of baubles and playthings? But Between them comes something else. perhaps we would do well to reconsider An accretion, a flow, the sand that slips this question and others like it in light of through the skylight of the hourglass, Fabian’s chronopolitics: if clocks went and makes that little hill, from its base to into the world, at least in part, to show its ever-sliding tip. Between the bottom non-Europeans that they were in the of time and the top comes the remain- past, then these tickers were not simply der. Time itself. Which we have not useful tools, scienti½c instruments, or caught. Which does not ½t. symbols of the clockwork universe– What would it be like to let this sand they were also agonistic instruments. fall into our hands, and neither to dig Little boxes that measured not merely nor to climb? I do not know. time, but men; and which were always

Dædalus Spring 2003 19 David S. Landes

Clocks & the wealth of nations

A recent novel by Dai Sijie, Balzac et la you good-for-nothings! What are you petite tailleuse chinoise,1 tells of the impact waiting for? of an alarm clock imported into a Chi- Almost all cultures and civilizations nese farm village: have concerned themselves with time, if Before, in this village, there had been nei- only to give cues and set bounds to social ther alarm, nor watch, nor clock. People and religious activity. To these ends, they had always lived by the rising or setting of have relied principally on repetitive nat- the sun. ural phenomena–on the movements We were surprised to see how the alarm and changing lineaments of heavenly assumed a veritable power over the peas- bodies. Such clues are not regular in ants, almost sacred. Everyone came to occurrence nor identical from one to consult it, as if our house were some kind another point of observation. They are of temple. Every morning the same ritual: suf½ciently so, however, for most practi- the chief strode around our house, smok- cal purposes. ing his bamboo pipe, as long as an old ri- The more technologically advanced fle. He did not stop looking at the alarm. societies have gone beyond passive ob- And at 9 o’clock precisely, he gave a long, servation to create instruments of time deafening whistle, to send the villagers off measurement–what we call clocks. to the ½elds. These initially relied on the observation –It’s time, you hear me! he shouted out and measurement of an arti½cially creat- to the houses around. It’s time to work, ed regularity–a gravity-driven falling column of water or sand, for example. Such instruments can provide a fairly David S. Landes is Coolidge Professor of History accurate measure, though they do not and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard afford identical comparisons among University. A Fellow of the American Academy themselves and require painstaking at- since 1967, he has been bridging disciplines tention by way of re½lling the chamber throughout his career as an economist and a spe- and restarting the process. Resetting the cialist in the modern history of Western Europe clock requires an accurate standard that and the Middle East. His books include “The takes account of seasonal variations, Unbound Prometheus” (1969), “Revolution in and, insofar as this standard may be the Time” (1983), and, most recently, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” (1998). 1 Dai Sijie, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).

20 Dædalus Spring 2003 sky, may require such associated tools as hina is an excellent example of the Clocks & C the wealth a telescope and a little bit of luck in the differences that emerged between Eu- of nations way of good visibility. rope and Asia. This was a civilization It was this uncertain visibility that may that esteemed timekeepers and built have pushed European time-watchers to good water clocks (klepsydras) to this invent a mechanical clock. In any case, purpose. Students of the history of Chi- the Europeans early on sought to invent nese technology and invention have long a machine that would keep time of itself boasted of Chinese precocity and origi- and continue to do so even during mo- nality, and sought to explain subsequent ments of rewinding; that would depend, Western leadership as the result of copy- in other words, as little as possible on ce- cat emulation, citing such items as pa- lestial indicators. The critical innovation per, printing, porcelain, and gunpowder. turned out to be the principle and tech- Timekeeping has challenged this model. nique of oscillation–of coming and go- It is not only that the mechanical clock is ing, va-et-vient–a combination whose so much better an instrument than the regularity combined with repetitiveness klepsydra. It is that even when Euro- to provide countable time units. It found peans brought the clock to China, as gift, realization in the thirteenth century. bribe, and boast, the Chinese, who loved From then on, and simply because one it, never really learned how to make it. In civilization had invented mechanical matters of technology, early modern Eu- clocks and the other had not, West ropeans were simply much better stu- diverged from East, Europe from Asia. dents. This divergence found expression and The Europeans also took temporal consequence, ½rst, in the making of accuracy much more seriously. For the timekeepers; and second, in their use. Chinese, this was not a problem, because As to the making: the accuracy now the hour was what the authorities said it lay in the instrument itself, which had to was. They did have access to celestial be built to appropriate standards. This indicators: the positions of planets and meant that every part had to be cut to stars, the sky map. But barring egregious the utmost precision, which in turn discrepancies, the pursuit of such infor- called for tools and measures unimag- mation was more trouble than it was ined before. The effect was felt not only worth, especially to potential astrono- in clock-making but also in other mers who had little to gain from dili- branches of manufacture, including gence. We have here from the eighteenth those not yet known. Where once what century an informative set of letters mattered was the craftsman’s feel for his from a Jesuit missionary, P. Parennin, to work and tools, now standards could be the director of the Académie des Sci- set in advance and were subject to exter- ences in Paris.2 His ½rst point: that good nal prescription and judgment of per- observations brought little gain or rec- formance. ompense to those who made them. They As to the use: temporal precision had might rise to honor in the Mathematical to matter. It came early to matter in Eu- Tribunal, but such advance brought little rope for its own sake; application came later. Elsewhere, time continued either 2 In Isabelle and Jean-Louis Vissière, eds., Let- to be a visual function, available to all, or tres édi½antes et curieuses des Jésuites de Chine the prerogative of an authority that dic- 1702–1776 (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, tated accuracy from above. 2001), 180–188; based on the edition of 1819.

Dædalus Spring 2003 21 David S. income, the less so as Mathematics was drical data on the timing of the positions Landes on subordinate to the Tribunal of Ceremo- of celestial bodies, times eventually as- time nies. Even worse, the risk outweighed sembled in tabular form (ephemerides the pro½t, as a mistake could cost a year and almanacs). or two of salary. Why was latitude so important? Be- As a result, the instruments needed for cause of the special conditions of naviga- accurate observation, the eyeglasses and tion in the south Atlantic. The original water clocks, were simply neglected and assumption of Portuguese sailors head- abandoned. Nor did the authorities im- ing southward was to hug the western pose their use: coast of Africa, using it as guide, shelter, and source of provisions in traditional The palace of the Emperor is well coasting fashion. The trouble was that equipped in this respect, and these instru- this was a singularly barren and inhos- ments are [often] the work of Europe’s pitable coast, marked by countervailing best craftsmen; but the emperor Cang-hi winds and currents, so that this prudent [Kangxi] who has had the astronomical recourse to established navigational tables corrected and has equipped the [Pe- technique entailed long voyages–so king] observatory with so many beautiful long as to threaten the health and sur- instruments, and who besides knows bet- vival of the crew. ter than anyone how much eyeglasses and Appropriate procedure called for navi- clocks are necessary to exact observations, gational avoidance, for sailing west with has never ordered his mathematicians to wind and currents–as far west as the use them. No doubt these last have been coast of what came to be called Brazil or strongly opposed to these inventions and South America–and then, after swing- have made much of the nation’s attach- ing south, for picking up the powerful ment to older ways–a position where they eastward antarctic stream that would are guided only by their own interest. We carry the vessels swiftly past the south- have every reason to fear that with a ern point of Africa into eastern waters. change in dynasty, the older Chinese in- To do this, however, required a knowl- struments, once relegated to the scrap fur- edge of latitude, and this called for fre- nace, will reappear with honor, and that quent time readings. Initially these were those devices that have usefully replaced based on celestial observations at inter- them will be sent to the foundry, the bet- vals–an approximate but roughly satis- ter to erase their very memory. factory procedure. Over the years and decades, however, navigators learned to Meanwhile, the Europeans found new use clocks. Not the klepsydra, for that ways to use time. Where other societies was a timekeeper that worked only when saw it as a clue to banal everyday work kept still. But the weight-driven me- schedules, the Europeans, who also used chanical clock was another matter and in it that way, integrated it into other activ- the higher spring-driven chronometer ities and changed them completely. Take form of the eighteenth century it made sailing and navigation: the very perfor- possible the calculation of longitude. mance that brought the Europeans Together with latitude this made it pos- around Africa into eastern waters de- sible for European navigators to locate pended on knowledge of latitude, and themselves. It was time, then, in combi- latitude calculations made use of calen- nation with navigational imagination

22 Dædalus Spring 2003 and courage, that opened the world. And the Great Exposition in London. That Clocks & the wealth so it was that the ‘barbarians’ came to was three hundred and ½fty years after of nations Asia, and not the reverse. the ½rst Portuguese vessels found their The Chinese had in fact sent out larger way into Chinese ports–one more evi- fleets with larger vessels a half century dence of the Chinese indifference to out- earlier, and these had reached the east siders and opportunity. coast of Africa.3 That is as far as they Chinese contempt for most Western went, for their primary aim was to bring things has been traditionally summed up back specimens of wildlife unknown in in the dismissive letter (rescript) of the China–giraffe, hippopotamus–and add Qianlong emperor (reigned 1736–1795) them to the emperor’s collections, in to George III of Great Britain, rejecting demonstration of his pretensions to uni- the British request of 1793 for trading versality. But this costly venture posed rights and a permanent legation in Pe- problems of etiquette once the captive king: “We have never set much store on beasts reached China: the emperor strange and ingenious objects, nor do we wanted to see his new giraffe, but the need any more of your country’s manu- rules had it that the emperor could not, factures.” The Europeans in an earlier should not, go out of his way to see any- period had certainly learned from Chi- body or anything; he or it had to come to na; the Chinese of the eighteenth centu- him. So the courtiers arranged for the ry did not feel they had anything to emperor to take a walk in his park, learn. where he ‘chanced’ to come upon a ‘wandering’ giraffe. Thus he saw his The easy availability of good timekeep- booty, and order was preserved.4 ing instruments, at least to those who These early Chinese voyages preceded could afford them, reinforced the gener- the European ones by half a century or al interest in and pursuit of time. These more, but lacked serious motivation instruments also provided endless op- (read: greed). The Chinese court found portunities for obsessive behavior. the voyages inordinately costly, and not The examples are many, and all of us only never followed up, but banned fur- know friends and acquaintances who ther oceanic exploration. Thus the ½rst pursue precision and promptness as a Chinese vessel to sail around Africa into source of comfort and achievement. Let the Atlantic went in 1850–1851 to attend me offer an example from history: Gus- tav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, heir 3 Recent literature has credited China with wider navigational and exploratory priority, for to the great German steel and arma- example Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China ments fortune, king of the family castle, Discovered America (New York: William Mor- worshiper of ef½ciency, concentration, row & Co., 2003). John Noble Wilford’s review above all, punctuality. in The New York Times Book Review of 2 February In a nation of clock-watchers, Gustav 2003 questions Menzies’ evidence, but he would have done better to ask, So what? stood out. Breakfast at the castle was served exactly at 07:15 hours, and the 4 A parallel version of this story is told of guest who arrived a minute late found King Louis xiv of France, like the emperor of the doors locked. That morning meal China a ruler of unlimited pretensions. Which was set to last ½fteen minutes, when version came ½rst, I do not know. To this day, Gustav went out to his carriage or, from the French are the self-styled representatives of higher civilization in a world of lesser speci- 1908, his limousine. The moment his mens. feet left the ground, the vehicle took off.

Dædalus Spring 2003 23 David S. He kept a schedule book listing each initially was the gain to industry and Landes on day’s engagements by the minute, in- manufacturing, particularly as a measure time cluding just so much time to prepare and and test of performance and productivi- verify the next day’s schedule. Fifty min- ty. These were activities, after all, that utes were allocated to dinner, unless proceeded in accord with human, tradi- there were guests, in which case dinner tional work rhythms, the more so as went precisely to 21:45. Then thirty min- wages were often calculated by the utes for evening toilette and small talk, piece, and buyers and employers had lit- and he and Bertha slipped into bed and tle or no advantage in speeding the dutiful union at 22:15. work. By the same token, ½xed times were The adoption of mass-production reserved for play with the children. The techniques, however, changed the na- favorite toy was a railroad, with its own ture of labor performance and the prin- schedules, which Gustav supervised ciples of remuneration. The coordina- with stopwatch in hand. Lunch guests tion of tasks made all the difference. were not allowed to come in their own Now it was important, nay crucial, to cars; they or their chauffeurs might be assign the work and provide the equip- late. They were fetched by Krupp driv- ment in such ways as to permit smooth ers, who brought them to the castle at and uninterrupted progress–to clear 13:29. A minute later they entered the space and bring tools and materiel to the reception room to chat, then sat to table right places at the right time. Also–and at 13:40. The moment Gustav ½nished a this was essential to wise decision-mak- course, all plates were removed. Slow ing–to measure and compare the rela- eaters gave up what was left. Meal over tive productivity of one arrangement as at 14:15, coffee at 14:29. The coffee was against another. The ever-present stop- served at a pre-set temperature, never watch was the key to gains and costs. too hot. Gustav felt that a craving for The pioneer here was Henry Ford. He warmth was a sign of weakness, and was a ½rm believer in the moral virtue of yielding to one weakness would encour- democratic transport and mass produc- age others. At 14:30 precisely, guests tion, of cheap cars for the multitude. stepped into the waiting limos and were The flivver showed the way. And the de- whisked away.5 mand for Model T’s kept growing apace: 18,664 cars in 1909–1910, 34,528 in 1910 The contributions of mechanical time- –1911, 78,440 in 1911–1912. Some way keepers to sailing and navigation were had to be found to increase output with- spectacular, with major gains to route out inflating prices, in short, to increase selection and related economies.6 To productivity. One technique was to land transport as well, particularly with move toward interchangeable parts. the coming of the railroad. Less obvious Henry and his engineers were constantly on the lookout for more accurate and 5 On all this and more, see William Manches- precise machine tools, aiming at toler- ter, The Arms of Krupp (Boston: Little, Brown, ances of one ten-thousandth of an inch. 1968), 251–254. Any time they found a better tool, they scrapped all the old ones. The managers 6 See William J. H. Andrewes, ed., The Quest for Longitude (Cambridge, Mass.: Collection of His- grimaced with pain, but went along be- torical Scienti½c Instruments, Harvard Univer- cause the boss and the engineers wanted sity, 1996). it that way. In two years, by 1910, the

24 Dædalus Spring 2003 careful ½ling and adjustment of inaccu- upward.”8 They stress the accidents of Clocks & the wealth rate parts were done away with. shrewd hiring; the readiness of Henry of nations A second major innovation was the and supervisors to give gifted men their simpli½cation and routinization of tasks, head; above all, the willingness to exper- thanks to the use of a moving assembly iment (always using watches). line. The old way was to bring the work- To be sure, the new technology posed ers to the work; now they brought the a problem to labor morale. The work work to the workers. This process devel- was dull and thus fatiguing, and the con- oped in three stages. First, teams of as- stant pressure to raise productivity semblers moved from ½xed chassis to pushed effort to ever-higher limits. Hen- ½xed chassis, or assemblers simply ry Ford’s answer was to introduce a re- stayed with their chassis while others cord daily wage. He did not want to base brought them tools and parts as needed. wages on output (piece wages)–the Average time (stopwatches had become prevalent Detroit method–because he indispensable tools): twelve and a half felt that productivity gains came from man-hours per chassis. Then came line above; also because the Ford company production: a rope or cable winch pulled was changing methods and procedures the chassis along while teams of assem- too fast to permit appropriate and timely blers moved with it, picking up parts recalculations. And of course, once the from bins strategically placed along the assembly line was introduced, piece way–jerky, irregular progress. Average wages would not have made sense: it time: 5 man-hours, 50 minutes. Then was the speed of the line that set the workers were placed in carefully calcu- level of output. But Henry wanted to be lated stationary positions along the way, able to recruit a diligent, reliable work- while the moving chassis ran along at force eager for high pay. The answer, waist height and overhead carriers and voted January 1914, was the $5 day, two gravity slides brought subassemblies as to three times the prevalent level. Not needed. Best time: 93 minutes. Henry right away, of course: workers had to put rejoiced: “Save ten steps a day for each in six months of training and adaptation of 12,000 employees, and you will have at base-pay $2.34 before the new level saved ½fty miles of wasted motion and kicked in as an implicitly conditional mis-spent energy.”7 Output more than pro½t-sharing bonus. doubled in 1912–1913 and doubled again Nothing did more than this pay raise the next year, while the workforce actu- to enhance Ford’s reputation as a states- ally fell. man of industry and a model of employ- Henry Ford, with the aid of a remark- er wisdom and generosity. Newspapers able team of collaborators, had thus all over the country carried the story, effected a revolution in production tech- and would-be workers lined up outside nology. In his autobiographical essay, My the factory gates by the thousands, far Life and Work, Henry conveys the impres- beyond the hiring possibilities of even sion that all the ideas and techniques an exploding company. One newspaper went from him down. Nevins and Hill, headline went so far as to invoke divine observing the process from beyond and benediction: “God Bless Henry Ford.” after, ½nd this simpli½cation erroneous: “seminal ideas moved from the bottom 8 Allan Nevins with the collaboration of Frank Ernest Hill, Ford, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, 7 Ibid., 109. 1954– 1963), 474.

Dædalus Spring 2003 25 David S. It goes without saying that these meth- Landes on ods were copyable and much copied. time That has always been the supreme ad- vantage of modern techniques of time measurement: the instruments are rela- tively cheap and widely applicable.

I would not want simply to say that time measurement and the mechanical clock made the modern world and gave the West primacy over the Rest. That they did. But the clock in turn was part of a larg- er open, competitive Western attitude toward knowledge, science, and explo- ration. Nothing like this attitude was to be found elsewhere. Attitude and theme came together, and we have all been the bene½ciaries, including those civiliza- tions and societies that are now learning and catching up. Vive l’heure! Et vive l’horloge!

26 Dædalus Spring 2003 Michael Rosbash

A biological clock

Time: why and how do living organ- brain. There are very rapid temporal isms harmonize with the fourth dimen- events, of intense interest to neurobiolo- sion of our world? gists, on the millisecond (0.001 seconds) Many biologists have little interest in timescale. Here timing is everything, this question. They concentrate instead and information-processing in a neuro- on the three-dimensional world, trying biological context does not work at all if to understand how the proper size and events do not occur with proper speed shape of organisms are encoded and and coordination. achieved, and how the human brain is Then consider the evolution of life on wired. Although these matters are not earth. It has taken three to four billion completely divorced from temporal con- years for our species to emerge since siderations–an organism must make the primitive life-forms ½rst arose in the pri- correct gene products in the correct se- mordial soup. The last 0.1 percent of this quence and at the correct stage of devel- journey, approximately ½ve million opment–timing has received scant at- years, is the time since the last common tention during the past thirty years or so ancestor shared between humans and in such ½elds as molecular and develop- our closest relatives, chimpanzees. It is mental biology. generally acknowledged that many fea- In contrast, other biologists, working tures unique to our species, like walking in such ½elds as neuroscience and evolu- upright and sophisticated verbal com- tionary biology, regard the issue of time munication, arose during this last tiny as urgent and inescapable. Consider the fraction of our planet’s biological experi- ment. Yet even this 0.1 percent, or 5 mil- lion years, is a number that dwarfs the Michael Rosbash is a professor of biology at average human life span and comprises Brandeis University and an Investigator for the perhaps two hundred ½fty thousand to Howard Hughes Medical Institute. A Fellow of ½ve hundred thousand ape-human gen- the American Academy since 1997, he is an expert erations. in rna processing, neurobiology, and circadian The incredibly slow march of evolu- rhythms. He is the author or co-author of more tionary time and the very rapid events of than two hundred articles for such journals as neuronal ½ring are well beyond the expe- “Nature,” “Molecular Cell,” “The Journal of rience or intuition of most if not all Neuroscience,” and “The Proceedings of the members of our species. The inability of National Academy of Science.” people to achieve a comfortable relation-

Dædalus Spring 2003 27 Michael ship with these very large and very small sistent with the loose relationship to a Rosbash numbers has almost certainly contrib- twenty-four-hour cycle, intrinsic period on time uted to society’s dif½culties with mind- varies from species to species, from brain issues on the one hand and Dar- about twenty-two to about twenty-six winian evolution on the other. hours. The fact that there is a difference be- No such dif½culties attend the topic of tween the ‘intrinsic period’ of an organ- my own area of biological interest: the ism and the actual twenty-four-hour circadian rhythms that regulate living cycle of the external world implies that organisms. These rhythms function on circadian clocks are not solely light- the much more familiar timescale of driven. From a practical standpoint, it twenty-four hours. The name ‘circadian’ also implies that the intrinsic period comes from the Latin circa dia and means must be measured under constant condi- ‘about a day.’ This is because circadian tions, constant darkness or constant periods do not last exactly twenty-four light along with constant temperature. hours but rather vary somewhat from This is to avoid the synchronization with organism to organism. These inexorable the actual twenty-four-hour light-dark rhythms, due to the persistent beating of cycle that normally takes place. a biological clock in our brains and in It is generally acknowledged that the other tissues, serve to coordinate many ½rst person to recognize this organic features of our behavior, metabolism, phenomenon was an eighteenth-century and physiology–even our sleep-wake French astronomer named de Mairan. cycle. Circadian rhythms are also pres- He had been musing about plant ent in plants and in most, perhaps all rhythms, wondering what drove plants eukaryotic life-forms, i.e., complex or- to extend their leaves during the daytime ganisms like us with a nuclear mem- and retract them at night. Intuition sug- brane. Bona ½de circadian rhythms are gests that this daily leaf movement even present in some photosynthetic rhythm should be light-driven, but in bacterial species. 1729 de Mairan elected to test this hy- The relationship to photosynthesis is pothesis. To perform the ½rst free- not coincidental, as circadian rhythms running circadian experiment, he took reflect an almost ubiquitous adaptation a plant down to his basement (la cave), to the twenty-four-hour-day cycle. The where there were constant conditions, rotation of the earth on its axis is the i.e., no daily variations in light or tem- source of daily temperature as well as of perature (good for storing wine). Mirabi- light-dark cycles and is considered the le dictu, the leaf movements continued oldest and most continuous feature of unabated on a circa twenty-four-hour life on earth. Even the ½rst organisms– schedule, indicating that they were driv- perhaps the self-replicating molecules of en by an endogenous circadian clock the original rna world that probably rather than by light. preceded cellular life–arose in the pres- Many different kinds of experiments ence of a light-dark cycle much like the under constant conditions support this one we experience today. It was perhaps general conclusion, namely, that most 20 percent shorter four billion years ago, organisms contain self-sustaining pace- which might contribute to the explana- makers at the heart of their circadian tion of why circadian clocks are not pre- systems. Mice have periods of about 23.5 cise twenty-four-hour timekeepers. Con- hours and rats about 24.5 hours under

28 Dædalus Spring 2003 constant conditions. Importantly, there genetic in origin, due for example to a A biological are even differences between inbred fortuitous mutation in an important clock strains of mice, indicating that quantita- clock gene. (This is fortuitous for the tive features of the circadian system are investigator; not always for the individ- under genetic control. (Much more ual, if we are considering humans.) about genetics and mutants below). The second, larger category of mu- Under more normal light-dark condi- tants is induced. This is usually due to tions, animals sense light and especially the feeding of mutagens to animals or the changes in illumination intensity bacteria, which causes a high frequency that are normally experienced at dawn of dna alterations and a concomitant and dusk. Photoreceptors transmit these high frequency of mutations. (Needless time-of-day signals through speci½c in- to say, this is not done with humans.) put pathways to their endogenous bio- The strategy is then to screen the treated logical clocks. One or more of these pho- population for a mutant phenotype, a toreceptors provides a daily reset of circadian abnormality for example, and these endogenous clocks and keeps them verify that it ‘breeds true’ and is trans- synchronized with the actual twenty- missible to subsequent generations. This four-hour light-dark cycle of the external ‘forward genetics’ approach (called ‘ge- world. A one-hour delay remains a one- netics’ before the more recent advent of hour delay, day after day, and every day recombinant dna and ‘reverse genet- is the same as the day before. Otherwise ics’) has been a mainstay of biological put, circadian clocks run too fast or too research for much of the twentieth cen- slow, but they are reset at the same time tury, both in microorganisms as well as every day by the very precise twenty- more complex organisms like Drosophila four-hour light-dark cycle. This general (fruit flies). This canonical strategy was principle gives rise to an important rela- originally concerned almost exclusively tionship between period as measured in with mechanisms of inheritance, i.e., constant darkness and phase as mea- how particular characteristics (pheno- sured under more normal light-dark types) are transmitted from generation conditions. An individual with a shorter to generation. This more descriptive period under constant conditions will ½eld of genetics predominated during usually manifest an advanced phase the ½rst half of the twentieth century under normal conditions. This pertains and presaged the Watson-Crick discov- to comparisons between species as well ery of the structure of dna in 1952–1953. as between individuals of a single spe- A more biochemical genetics, the cies–a mutant for example. study of gene expression, has predomi- What are circadian mutants and how nated since that time. Especially over the do they arise? It is important to appreci- past thirty years, this has given rise to an ate that mutants in general (mutants of abundance of information about genes any characteristic and of any organism) and their functions. The recent comple- are of two kinds. First, there are sponta- tion of the human genome dna se- neous mutants, oddballs that arise by quence, approximately three billion base chance. These are oddballs in the proba- pairs per person, is a particularly visible bility and statistics sense of the word, example of this progress. The worldwide with no pejorative connotation implied. effort to understand dna and its expres- They might have one or more unusual sion has provided the world of molecu- circadian characteristics, which are lar biology with a highly sophisticated

Dædalus Spring 2003 29 Michael tool kit, culminating in the now rather Understanding the ‘mechanism of in- Rosbash on straightforward ability to identify and heritance’ was no longer the goal. Rath- time sequence a mutant gene and identify the er, the goal became understanding the precise genetic lesion–the genotype re- biochemical underpinnings of behav- sponsible for the appearance or relevant ioral biology. The research strategy was characteristic(s) of the mutant organ- simple: isolating a mutant gene associat- ism–the phenotype. ed with aberrant circadian rhythms will identify the underlying biochemical It was against this general backdrop cause of the behavior. For example, a that Seymour Benzer decided in 1965 to mutant clock gene will encode a mutant apply genetic strategies in an effort to clock protein (genes
rna
protein; explain enigmatic behavioral problems the central dogma of molecular biology), like circadian rhythms and memory. which can be mapped by traditional pro- Benzer had made a large contribution to cedures and then used to further probe the understanding of gene expression clock mechanisms. during the 1950s and early 1960s, and he The genetic approach that Benzer pio- had a fascination with behavior. Al- neered is not without controversy. Does though studied for a long time in many the existence of clock genes (or memory organisms including insects, these prob- genes, or sex-drive genes) mean that hu- lems like circadian rhythms and memo- man behavior is hardwired by our genes, ry were almost intractable from a molec- with no room for environmental influ- ular standpoint. This is despite the fact ence? If we have behavioral genes, what that electrophysiologists and pharma- room is there for free will and responsi- cologists had been working successfully bility? Few people question the inheri- on the mechanisms that underlie the tance of height, hair color, or eye color basic structure and function of neurons. from parents to children. Almost every- There was still no obvious way to gain one seems to agree that tall parents are access to the genes and especially to the more likely to have tall children. (The proteins that must constitute at least genetics can be complicated, so the out- part of the biochemical machinery that comes are statistical within a popula- lies at the heart of rhythms and memory. tion, i.e., it doesn’t always work in every (Proteins are involved in just about ev- case.) But the possible inheritance of erything biological.) brain characteristics (personality, sense The genetics and molecular biology of humor, and intelligence for example) community was brimming with con½- raises hackles for almost religious rea- dence after its remarkable success at sons: the brain appears to be divine ter- providing mechanistic explanations for ritory. On this issue, many neuroscien- inheritance and the genetic code. As a tists stand ½rm and believe that all be- consequence perhaps, Benzer and others havioral phenomena ultimately will have found unsatisfying the descriptive (non- biochemical underpinnings. This does biochemical) approaches and explana- not negate the fact that the underlying tions used in behavioral studies. With mechanisms in many cases (e.g., com- almost religious zeal, they believed that plex reasoning, consciousness) may be genetics was the path to enlightenment. very complicated and beyond our grasp This new approach to behavior also rep- for years and perhaps even decades. resented a paradigm shift for the ½eld, as It is important to understand that the it went from being an end in itself to possible inheritance of behavioral prop- being a means to very different ends. erties from parents to offspring in hu- 30 Dædalus Spring 2003 mans has little to do with the genetic soever. All three mutants were allelic, A biological strategies in model organisms designed i.e., they were all due to mutations in the clock to illuminate brain-behavior mecha- same gene, which they named period. nisms. Researchers interested in human This was not only a landmark achieve- genetics–i.e., the possible inheritance ment, which kick-started the circadian of behavioral properties from parents– rhythm ½eld, but also unusually pre- focus on the question: Are brain pheno- scient. This ½rst clock gene was identi- types that distinguish different human ½ed several years before the ½rst recom- beings heritable? The question Benzer binant dna papers appeared in the sci- posed was: Can I identify behavioral enti½c literature, and a decade or more genes in a model organism, and will they before the cloning of genes became a illuminate something fundamental (and truly practical technology, even in so- hopefully ubiquitous) about the under- phisticated laboratories. In other words, lying mechanisms, even in humans? At- the period mutants were identi½ed and tempts to answer the human genetics characterized by Konopka and Benzer question rely on an uncertain principle well before the more complete molecu- and subtle analyses of phenotypic differ- lar genetic vision was conceptualized, let ences between individuals. alone realized. Although these mutants The model organism genetic strategy, gave Konopka and Benzer as well as oth- by contrast, uses an experimental ers an invaluable tool with which to ma- sledgehammer to debilitate a key gene nipulate the circadian system of flies, and hopefully create a striking pheno- another thirteen years passed before the type, in every offspring from that origi- period gene was cloned and identi½ed by nal mutant. If the phenotype is robust molecular methods. and maps to a single gene, it should pro- In the intervening years, Konopka vide an entrée into what might other- continued to work on Drosophila clocks wise be an intractable scienti½c prob- with traditional tools, as a faculty mem- lem. This strategy has proved to be a ber at Caltech and then at Clarkson Col- staggering success for biological clocks lege. At the same time, I was doing mol- and learning and memory, and we now ecular biology on completely unrelated have a fairly sophisticated grasp of the subjects, ½rst as a postdoctoral fellow relevant biochemical machineries. in Scotland, and since 1974 as a faculty member at Brandeis University. I did not Benzer and his student Ron Konopka read or even hear about the Konopka ½rst explored the genetics of circadian and Benzer paper until the mid to late rhythms by studying fruit flies. Their 1970s, from my friend, colleague, and research, published in 1971, resulted in ultimately long-term collaborator Jeff the identi½cation of the ½rst clock gene. Hall. He was a contemporary of Ron By mutagenizing and screening progeny Konopka in the laboratory of Seymour for their locomotor activity rhythms Benzer and continued to work on behav- (rhythms of rest-activity cycles, more or ioral genetics and fly courtship after he less the insect analog of our sleep-wake took a faculty position at Brandeis, also cycle) in constant darkness, they iden- in 1974. (Hall and Konopka remain ti½ed three types of circadian-rhythm friends to this day.) mutants: a short-period mutant (nine- Hall was also doing some work on cir- teen-hour period), a long-period mutant cadian rhythms, because the period mu- (twenty-nine-hour period), and an ar- tants had a pronounced effect on a par- rhythmic mutant with no rhythms what- ticular aspect of fruit-fly courtship. In Dædalus Spring 2003 31 Michael 1982, after the recombinant dna revolu- did not reveal the function of a protein. Rosbash on tion had transformed my laboratory as (Although less problematic today, the time well as many others, Jeff Hall and I de- function of perhaps 50 percent of human cided to apply these new technologies to proteins is still uncertain.) This was the the problem of circadian rhythms and situation until 1988, when there ap- clone the period gene. At that time, he peared the sequence of a well-under- was the Drosophila rhythm guru and I the stood Drosophila protein with a clear re- molecular biologist, and we published lationship to the period protein. This rel- our successful results in 1984. Important- ative was a known transcription factor, ly, the gene was identi½ed by germ-line meaning that it functioned in gene ex- transformation, in which the phenotype pression to ‘transcribe’ dna into rna. of the mutant flies was altered by inject- Although the two proteins were not very ing cloned wild-type dna. (‘Wild type’ close relatives and only a limited portion is genetic patois for a normal, as opposed of the protein sequences was in common to mutant, individual or gene.) The phe- (and the region in common was itself of notype was converted back to that char- uncertain function), the similarity was acteristic of a wild-type strain, showing unambiguous and inspired us at Bran- that the injected dna contained the nor- deis to explore the following hypothesis: mal gene. Mike Young at Rockefeller Perhaps per itself was a transcription University used a very similar strategy factor–and if it was, then perhaps the and published the same result at essen- regulation of transcription was central tially the same time. This was the ½rst to circadian rhythms. transgenic rescue of a behavioral gene in In 1990, almost twenty years after the any organism. landmark Konopka and Benzer publica- Unfortunately, this achievement was tion, we published the ½nding that peri- still not entirely satisfying. This is be- od messenger rna (mrna) levels under- cause a key aspect of the circadian sys- go circadian oscillations and that per tem, the period protein (per) and par- regulates the period and phase of its own ticularly its function, remained un- mrna cycling. In other words, the mrna known. Both our laboratories at Bran- cycling was sensitive to the Konopka and deis and the Young laboratory at Rocke- Benzer mutations and paralleled the pre- feller worked on the relationship of this viously described changes in the behav- gene to circadian rhythms during the ioral cycle. (Remember: dna
mrna
next few years, which resulted in several protein; synthesis of mrna using dna signi½cant advances. We both mapped as a template = transcription and synthe- the sequence of the complete protein sis of protein using mrna as a template and located the precise nucleotide = translation.) Over the next several changes responsible for the slow, fast, years, we expanded on this observation and arrhythmic alleles. However, know- and showed that the fluctuations in peri- ing the dna sequence still did not ex- od mrna levels were largely transcrip- plain the function of the period protein. tional and almost certainly reflected a This is because it was a ‘pioneer protein,’ negative feedback loop, in which per with no known relatives. In those early inhibits its own synthesis. days of dna sequencing, with only lim- Then, in 1997, the ½eld experienced ited database information from different another major breakthrough: the dis- organisms, it was much more the rule covery of the mammalian period genes. than the exception that a dna sequence For the ½rst time, it became clear that

32 Dædalus Spring 2003 the same transcriptional feedback loop the clocks of plants and fungi from A biological occurred in mammals–including another (or from more than one). The clock human beings–and not just in fruit situation contrasts with the protein syn- flies. This important ½nding uni½ed the thesis machines of plants, animals, and worlds of mammalian and insect even bacteria. They are so similar that it rhythms and indicated that a very simi- is universally accepted that protein syn- lar circadian machine operates in all thesis arose only once in evolution and complex animals. Indeed, almost all of has been passed on to all contemporary the additional fruit-fly pacemaker com- organisms from a single common ances- ponents discovered in the past decade tor. are conserved across species. These in- This multiple clocks hypothesis has to clude proteins that contribute to impor- deal with the fact that the molecular de- tant circadian posttranscriptional con- sign principles of these different clock trol mechanisms. (For the cognoscenti, systems are quite similar, i.e., they all this includes rna and protein stability involve the circadian regulation of dif- as well as protein phosphorylation.) The ferent transcription factors. This points conservation of functional clock compo- to convergent evolution subsequent to nents echoes a major biological theme multiple origins as the explanation for from dna work in many ½elds over the the similar design plans. previous two decades, namely, the same But in my view, a still more attractive genes make the same proteins and do possibility is that key common elements the same basic jobs in all complex ani- –missing links between the systems– mals. are as yet undiscovered, or insuf½ciently In other words, circadian rhythms are appreciated. Two recent studies have ancient. These biological clocks existed shown that the protein kinase ckii (ca- many hundreds of millions of years ago sein kinase II; a kinase puts phosphate –long before the evolution of insects groups on other molecules) is a clock and mammals. gene in Drosophila. As this enzyme had been previously implicated in the clocks Although there is a similar clockwork of plants and Neurospora, it is the ½rst (the circadian quartz crystal) in all ani- clock component shared between all mals, the machinery ticking in plants three systems and may reflect a common and fungi appears quite different–from evolutionary origin for the circadian sys- each other as well as from that in ani- tem in eukaryotes. mals. Although there is a very limited Because ckii plays a pivotal role in the relationship between a couple of animal response to ultraviolet radiation in or- clock genes and those in Neurospora (a ganisms ranging from yeast to humans, type of bread mold and an important it is possible that avoiding uv light was a circadian clock model organism because major driving force in the early evolu- of its genetics), it has long been general- tion of circadian systems. This idea is ly believed that circadian rhythm genes also based on other considerations, cen- are not truly shared among all three tered on light and its important relation- kingdoms: animals, plants, and fungi. ship to circadian rhythms. Although A commonly articulated conclusion is sunlight is a primary source of energy therefore that circadian rhythms arose for life on earth (via photosynthesis) and multiple times in evolution: animal is important for vision, it also provides a clocks come from one beginning, and critical temporal cue for circadian sys-

Dædalus Spring 2003 33 Michael tems. Indeed, most organisms have light-dark cycle, through the cell-auto- Rosbash on evolved specialized photoreceptors for nomous function of this photoreceptor. time circadian light perception. In Drosophila Even within the fruit-fly brain, cryp- and insects, the protein cryptochrome tochromes receive direct time-of-day serves as a major circadian photorecep- information from sunlight and transmit tor, whereas rhodopsins are the major it intracellularly to the clock machinery. visual photoreceptors (this is the same They are therefore true deep-brain pho- family of proteins that is used for visual toreceptors that bypass the eyes as a photoreception in mammals, including pathway for photic information. humans). In contrast, many mammals, including Although mammalian cryptochromes humans, have an opaque skull and must may also be circadian photoreceptors, therefore use their eyes as the source of the evidence is stronger that they are temporal as well as visual cues for the important central clock components. brain. Yet even in mammals it is virtually Importantly, cryptochromes are close certain that separate molecules and even relatives of photolyases, which are blue separate cells of the eye are used for cir- light-activated dna repair enzymes. cadian and visual photoreception. This This connection leads to the idea that is because the rods and cones, which the strong uv component of sunlight house visual photoreceptors, are unnec- contributed to the selective pressure for essary for circadian photoreception. On- the evolution of this specialized pho- ly very recently have speci½c retinal gan- toreceptor. Moreover, the blue light ab- glion cells, putative circadian photore- sorption maximum suggests that circa- ceptor cells within the retina, been iden- dian photoreception may have evolved ti½ed. They contain a specialized pho- in an aquatic environment shortly after toreceptor (melanopsin), which trans- animal life ½rst emerged, because only mits information to the circadian pace- blue light can penetrate to substantial maker region of the brain. This is a small depths in water. This is related to the part of the hypothalamus called the su- suggestion that diurnal fluctuations of prachiasmatic nucleus (scn). It is the some animals in the oceans (deeper in most important region of the mamma- the daytime, more shallow at night) are lian brain for orchestrating the circadian to avoid uv irradiation. Early photolyas- programs of the entire organism. scn es may then have signaled both the time cells contain a robust transcription- to descend and especially the time to rise translation cycle, which relies on the eye to the surface, a precursor of the circadi- for its photic information. an rhythm role played by their contem- porary descendents, cryptochromes. The importance of the retina to mam- Drosophila cryptochromes function as malian circadian rhythms has profound photoreceptors within most if not all implications for many blind people. individual clock cells. This is related to These individuals ‘free-run’ with an en- the fact that the self-sustaining tran- dogenous period characteristic of our scription-translation feedback loop that species, slightly longer than twenty-four lies at the heart of the circadian system hours. As a consequence, they periodi- is cell-autonomous, i.e., it operates inde- cally move out of sync with the rest of pendently within the many circadian the population and then have a myriad cells and tissues. A major factor keeping of physiological and behavioral dif½cul- these individual clocks synchronized is ties. This is because they cannot perceive their independent connection to the the actual twenty-four-hour light-dark 34 Dædalus Spring 2003 cycle that keeps most of us regular and tions, however, they are reset every day A biological ‘on time.’ The affected population is dif- by the normal light-dark cues and there- clock ½cult to identify with vision tests, be- fore maintain a constant but aberrant cause of the photoreceptor division of phase relationship with the external labor mentioned above. Individuals with twenty-four-hour cycle and the rest of an intact melanopsin system are pre- the circadian world. In some cases, this sumably able to ‘see’ circadian cues, in- interpretation has been veri½ed in a dependently of other visual dif½culties. sleep lab, where the influence of the ex- The blind population not only also un- ternal light-dark cycle can be removed derscores the importance of the eyes for and the intrinsic period measured. This the circadian system, but also indicates patient population therefore illustrates that other potential cues (temperature, the important relationship between noise, social interactions) do not have phase in a light-dark cycle and intrinsic much influence on human circadian period in constant conditions men- timing. tioned above. Fast or slow clocks have The circadian system also influences short or long periods, but these are nor- the human sleep-wake cycle. When mally masked by the daily reset from the circadian-blind individuals are out of external twenty-four-hour light-dark sync with the twenty-four-hour light- cycle. dark cycle, they have trouble falling It is interesting to note that the mutant asleep at night and rising at a normal fruit flies studied by Konopka and Benz- hour for work or school; for obvious rea- er were similarly able to adjust their be- sons, they then experience excessive havior. Although two of the circadian daytime sleepiness. These dif½culties mutant strains were originally identi½ed resemble some sleep disorders, which as period-altered in constant darkness, have long been interpreted as being cir- the mutant clocks nevertheless manifest cadian in origin. These include Advance perfect twenty-four-hour periodicity Sleep Phase Syndrome (asps) and De- when exposed to a normal light-dark layed Sleep Phase Syndrome (dsps). cycle. However, like people with asps Individuals with these disorders have and dsps, the mutant fruit flies have a normal sleep drive, which just kicks in phase-advanced or phase-delayed loco- too early or too late compared to most motor activity patterns under these con- of us and creates obvious conflicts with ditions. most of the human population. asps in- The link between human and fly dividuals become sleepy and fall asleep clocks, as well as between sleep and in the early evening, at perhaps 7 p.m. circadian rhythms, has been further They then sleep a normal and restful strengthened by the identi½cation and seven to eight hours and rise at 2–3 a.m. characterization of a family with inherit- dsps individuals have trouble falling ed asps. This unusual circumstance al- asleep until perhaps 4 a.m. and then lowed researchers to identify the ‘mu- want to sleep a normal eight hours until tant’ gene responsible for the inheri- noon. asps individuals are therefore tance of this sleep syndrome. It turned phase-advanced with respect to the out to be a mutation in a human period light-dark cycle, and dsps individuals gene, the ortholog of the original Dro- phase-delayed. sophila clock gene. (An ortholog is a gene Both groups are believed to have de- that looks the same and does the same fective pacemakers, which run too fast job in another, distantly related organ- or too slow. With normal ocular connec- ism.) The mutation is in one of the three Dædalus Spring 2003 35 Michael human period genes, which perform Rosbash on overlapping and similar clock tasks to time the single fruit fly gene. What lies ahead? From a practical standpoint, we may expect to see new classes of pharmaceuticals, better able to treat disorders of sleep and the problem of jet lag. From the standpoint of basic science, new molecules and principles will almost certainly be discovered. This is because there is a great deal that we still do not understand about circadian clocks and how they function. And only time will tell where modern biology will go in explaining how and why living organisms harmonize with the fourth dimension of our world.

36 Dædalus Spring 2003 Thomas Gold

Why time flows: the physics of past & future

“We have to assume that there exists a We all know this with a high degree of mathematical flow of time.” These were certainty. What gives us this informa- Newton’s words when he used time as tion? an important coordinate in the laws of Of course we sense the flow of time mechanics that he described so accurate- when we watch the hands of an ordinary ly. He seems to have understood that a clock move around in the clockwise di- separate assumption was implied, and rection. But why do they move in that that the flow of time was indeed a prop- direction? erty of our universe. It was the maker of the clock who de- We can measure time with great preci- signed it this way. He could have just as sion, so we might therefore believe, with easily mounted the gearwheels so that Newton, that time in our universe flows the hands would turn the other way with mathematical regularity. But our around. But he sensed, as we do, that ability to measure time does not really time flows in one direction, and so we account for another crucial aspect of our have all adopted the notation he had sense of the flow of time: namely, that it selected. flows in one direction, from the past to- As it happens, there is another feature ward the future. of every clock that seems to show that time flows in one direction only, from past to future. This is the power source Thomas Gold, professor emeritus of astronomy at that drives the clock. It may be an an- Cornell University, was founder and for twenty cient pendulum clock, whose sinking years director of the Cornell Center for Radio- weight, after it has been wound, will physics and Space Research. A Fellow of the supply the energy. Or it may be a spring- American Academy since 1957, he is the author of driven wristwatch that you have to wind more than two hundred eighty publications in var- up. Or a battery-powered device that ious ½elds of science, including cosmology, the uses an electric current to keep the clock mechanism of mammalian hearing, the nature of going. The energy supplied by every pulsars as rotating neutron stars, aspects of solar such power source dissipates among the system research, and the origin of planetary hy- working parts. While the direction of drocarbons, as discussed in his recent book, “The movement of the clock hands was only Deep Hot Biosphere.” an arbitrary choice, no clock can func- tion without a concentrated energy sup- ply that diffuses as time passes.

Dædalus Spring 2003 37 Thomas ould our conviction that time flows tween many particles can destroy the Gold C on in one direction spring from a similar time symmetry that is in evidence for time cause? any simple event. The reason appears to I raise the question because physics be this: In order to make predictions presents us with a dilemma: The de- with certainty, the initial conditions of tailed laws of physics nowhere de½ne the any experiment would have to be known direction of time’s flow. The laws that with perfect accuracy, as manifold inter- control the motion of elementary parti- actions are involved in the events that cles or of any simple system like a colli- follow. But since we live in a world of sion between particles, or even of the or- enormous complexity on the microscop- bits of the planets, are both time-sym- ic scale, a perfect knowledge of the ini- metrical and deterministic. From a dia- tial conditions is in practice unattain- gram showing any one of these actions able. We had previously understood that in which time is given as one of the coor- changes tend to go from order to disor- dinates, it would not be at all clear in der; we now understand that they may what direction time is flowing. Why go on beyond that, from disorder to then do we have this overpowering chaos. The chaotic state is one in which knowledge that allows us to distinguish no relation to the initial conditions can the flow as one which we call from the be recognized anymore. past to the future? An example of planetary orbits can The events of the past are not in show this. The few planets maintain doubt; but the events of the future we their orbits with great regularity, and we can only guess. That surely is one origin can make very good predictions where of the distinction between past and they will be at some time in the future. future, and therefore one reason why we But if we studied the hundreds or thou- all believe that the flow of time is asym- sands of minor planets, the asteroids, metrical. But can time-symmetrical that are all subject to the same laws of physical laws explain the difference we motion as the planets, we would ½nd feel between the past, which is certain, that an error of the position of one, of and the future, which seems uncertain? the insigni½cant amount of a few Why would the future not follow with- meters, would grow to an error in the out fail from the present, just as the pres- prediction of a few kilometers in a thou- ent seems to have followed without fail sand years. The new calculations now from the past? would change the perturbations caused The laws of physics may be time-sym- in other asteroids, which in turn would metrical, but they are not always deter- alter the predicted orbits of others yet. ministic. Some of the laws of physics Eventually this would lead to such defor- stipulate probabilities rather than de½- mations of all orbits, that even the most nite certainties. Could probabilistic laws precise determinations of all positions be the origin of the difference between and velocities would not allow a calcula- past and future? Or can time-symmetri- tion to ½nd a unique initial condition of cal, fully deterministic laws of physics the whole system. Despite obeying de- explain what seems to be the time-asym- terministic laws, the system would have metrical behavior of all the matter lost the unique relation to its starting around us and within us? condition. Only in the last forty years or so has it become fully understood that the super- Thermodynamics is the subject that positions of very many interactions be- deals with the consequences of the inter- 38 Dædalus Spring 2003 actions between very many particles. pool table, and then shows the balls con- The physics The laws of thermodynamics represent tracting into a regular triangle. You of past & future the statistical consequences of the laws would know at once that the regular tri- of physics. But because our world is angle was ½lmed at the beginning and composed of so many particles, and not at the end of the strip. because there are so many interactions In each case, the flow of time produces between them, these statistical results disorder from order, a diffusion of ener- bear great weight. It is only at this level, gy from a concentrated source, a low where the laws of physics are not deter- temperature from a high temperature. In ministic, that the time asymmetry that each case, too, it is such diffusion that we all experience appears. gives you time’s arrow. Thermodynam- Think of a cinematographic ½lm, and ics describes the processes that can oc- think what it would have to show if an cur freely in one sense of time, while examination of individual frames were they can occur in the opposite sense only to reveal in what order they were taken. in very restricted circumstances. Thus If the pictures showed us a car traveling the transport of energy from a lower to a along the road, we would say that it higher concentration is restricted, and it probably traveled forward, since we is then always only as a small fraction of identify the front and the back of a car. an energy flow, with the major flow go- But we could not be quite sure of our an- ing in the opposite way. The overall ef- swer–it might have traveled along the fect of any device that generates me- road all in reverse. If we saw a person chanical energy from heat must always diving into a swimming pool we could be to bring more heat energy to a lower answer the question with great certain- temperature than the amount it convert- ty–it would seem impossible that the ed to the more concentrated form of en- water would have expelled him up into ergy. This effect found a precise de½ni- the air, for him to land on the diving tion in a paper by a young French engi- board above. Or if our strip of ½lm neer called Carnot, already in 1824, a pa- showed an airplane running along a run- per of great signi½cance to the study of way and taking off into the air, we would thermodynamics, and later of special all be quite certain in which direction it import to Lord Kelvin’s identi½cation of was going. An airplane just could not the absolute zero of temperature. take off going backwards. What is so different about the airplane It has been questioned whether a statis- and the car? The car could run in reverse tical de½nition of the apparent flow of all right, and so could the aircraft. But time is compatible with Newton’s de- the aircraft could not take off in reverse. mand for a uniform mathematical flow. Why is that? The reason is that the air- Would such a flow not be erratic to the craft depends on the superposition of degree of the statistical fluctuations? the motion of a huge number of particles How could we then measure time inter- of air, while the automobile only de- vals with accuracies of better than one pends on the rotation of four wheels. If part in ten to the power thirteen? Would you had seen the car raising a dust cloud there not be differences in different loca- from the road you would also have rec- tions at the same moment? ognized the temporal sense in which the Physics provides us with many pro- ½lm had been taken. cesses that consistently de½ne intervals Think now of a ½lmstrip that records of time with very high precision. These an erratic distribution of the balls on a intervals are not related to the direction Dædalus Spring 2003 39 Thomas of the flow, just as the swing of the pen- pense of an even faster degradation of Gold on dulum is unrelated to the direction in the rest of that energy. Our earth hap- time which we know time to be flowing. pens to be a particularly favorable place It has also been suggested that the ob- for such a sidestep in the overall energy servable ½nite speed of light must surely flow, and our own livelihood is depend- de½ne the direction of time’s flow. The ent on this fortunate circumstance. A arrival of a light signal must surely be very small fraction of the heat output of later than its emission. But again there is the sun is temporarily held up by our no proof. The relativity discussion de- planet, and some fraction of this in turn ½nes the speed of light as just that speed is there converted by heat engines into a for which you cannot de½ne which event more concentrated form, such as the occurred earlier and which later; in oth- chemical energy plants derive from sun- er words, you cannot uniquely distin- light. This gives us the chemical energy guish emission from reception. The de- of the food we eat, and, through that, of tails of the two physical processes are in- all the things we can do. The ½nal desti- deed seen to be exact images of one an- nation of all the heat is the dispatch into other: the same momentum recoil, the the depths of space of the expanding same energy exchange. So, again, this universe, from which it does not return, gives no information on our subject. If or returns degraded from the initial mil- we were observing many events, like a lions of degrees to a temperature very burst of many photons from one locality close to the absolute zero. and a dispersed arrival of them, we It is the expansion of the universe that might again make a decision of probabil- is responsible for this overall flow of ity on statistical grounds. It would seem heat from the high temperature of the improbable that many diverse locations stars to the low temperature of the back- had emitted photons just so that they ground. If we did not have the expand- would all arrive closely packed and ing universe around us, with its ability to simultaneously, and so we would guess swallow up whatever energy is sent out that the concentrated event was emis- by the stars, only to return a minute frac- sion and the diffuse event, reception. tion, then this process could not occur. If The largest scale of the energy flows is the same amount of energy came back as that of the universe, and it dominates all went out, we would be living in a uni- others. Heat is generated at very high form temperature universe, and no temperatures by the nuclear processes in sources of free energy would be available the interior of stars, and from there be- to us. With only uniform heat all around gins a downhill flow to lower and lower us there would be no criterion that temperatures. In the course of this flow would distinguish the flow of time from of degradation, it may chance to encoun- past to future. Our concept of time and ter a heat engine that can produce a lim- its unidirectional flow could not exist in ited amount of free energy or higher such a world. temperature heat, but only at the ex-

40 Dædalus Spring 2003 Peter L. Galison & D. Graham Burnett

Einstein, Poincaré & modernity: a conversation

Newton, forgive me . . . material culture of time in the ½n de siè- –Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes cle. And you turned a lot of heads. Your argument went something like this: At d. graham burnett: Peter, in 1997 the heart of Einstein’s watershed 1905 you gave a plenary session lecture at the paper on special relativity–the paper History of Science Society meeting in La that shook the foundations of Newton- Jolla entitled “Relentless Historicism: ian physics–lies a ‘thought experiment’ Machines and Metaphysics.” I have a about clock synchronization and the vivid memory of the presentation, which ‘problem’ of simultaneity; there, talking was, I think, the ½rst time you shared about trains arriving in stations and with the wider community of historians observers watching their watches, Ein- and philosophers of science your re- stein posed what turn out to be insur- search on Einstein, relativity, and the mountable challenges to Newton’s notion of absolute time (and absolute space). This we knew. But then the talk Peter L. Galison has just completed a new book, got juicy: you went on to point out that “Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps,” that forms this thought experiment might not be the basis of this dialogue. A Fellow of the Ameri- merely a thought experiment, since the can Academy since 1992, Galison is the Mallin- business of synchronizing time frames ckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of through space was more than just Physics at Harvard University. Galison’s other abstruse theoretical physics in the late books, including “Image and Logic” (1997) and nineteenth and early twentieth cen- “How Experiments End” (1987), explore the turies. It was a perfectly real, quotidian, interaction between the principal subcultures of and central preoccupation of railway twentieth-century physics–experimentation, in- companies, nation-states, and military strumentation, and theory–and also the cross- planners. The increasing speed of rail- currents between physics and other ½elds. way travel in the second half of the nine- teenth century had made it necessary to D. Graham Burnett is an assistant professor of codify ‘time zones’ around the world– history in the Program in History of Science at zones of conventionalized simultaneity, Princeton University. He is the author of “Mas- where people would ignore local time ters of All They Surveyed”(2000) and “A Trial (say, the ‘noon’ of the sun), and go by By Jury” (2001), and a co-editor of “The History the noon on their clocks: a subtle of Cartography” (1987–). change, but an important one, since it © 2003 by Peter L. Galison and D. Graham Burnett Dædalus Spring 2003 41 Peter L. put people across the globe in temporal undiscovered) substance–the ‘ether’– Galison & D. Graham step. There was no other way to run a permeating everything, everywhere, Burnett railroad. Moreover, the design and man- present even in a vacuum. But experi- on ufacture of electromechanical systems mentalists had no luck ½nding this elu- time that ‘distributed’ this new coordinated sive medium. Einstein’s famous 1905 time–networks of clocks running in paper on relativity begins here. General- sync–was a major precision industry. izing from failed attempts to ‘see’ the Looked at in the right way, Einstein’s ether (or, more correctly, to see any evi- thought experiment bore an uncanny dence that the earth was moving resemblance to a set of wholly practical ‘through’ it), Einstein decided to scrap experiments going on all around him– the ether altogether, and to go after the even under his very nose, as he earned problem of the propagation of light in a his living in the Berne Patent Of½ce different way. First, he stipulated that all reviewing exactly these sorts of time- the laws of physics–including electricity distribution devices. That day in La Jolla and magnetism–were the same in any you left us with a question: Could we constantly moving frame of reference. really understand Einstein’s 1905 paper Then he added a seemingly simple (and without understanding the rise of inter- modest) second assumption: Light trav- national time conventions and the tech- els at the same speed no matter how fast nologies of industrial time-synchroniza- its source is moving. To anyone thinking tion? Now you have written a book, Ein- of ether this was not so strange: Move stein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of your hands at any reasonable speed Time, which delivers on this question through a room of still air; once you clap and expands your original insight. For your hands the sound waves propagate readers to whom all this is new, would through the room at the same speed– you start by describing how trains and independent of the original motion of clocks ½gure in Einstein’s landmark pub- your hands. Maybe light was like that: a lication? lamp moving in the ether simply excited light waves that radiated out at a single peter l. galison: Certainly. Perhaps speed independent of the motion of the the greatest success of nineteenth- lamp. Yet these two reasonable starting century physics was the prediction (and assumptions appeared to contradict one subsequent demonstration) of the exis- another. Suppose lamps were flying this tence of ‘electric waves.’ Light was noth- way and that at various speeds, but that ing other than such a wave. Suddenly the in some frame the light beams from ancient science of optics became no those lamps were all traveling at 186,000 more than a sub½eld of electromagnet- miles per second, just the speed predict- ism. At the same time, this thrilling ½nd- ed by the equations of electrodynamics. ing brought with it a puzzle: Physicists Wouldn’t those same beams of light of the late nineteenth century, very rea- appear to be traveling at different speeds sonably, thought that a wave had to be a when seen from a different, moving wave in something. After all, waves at the frame of reference? If that was so, then beach are waves in water, sound waves the equations of electrodynamics would are waves in air, and so on. But light only be valid in one frame of reference, could travel in a vacuum–that is, appar- violating Einstein’s ½rst principle. It was ently through empty space. This led to resolve this apparent contradiction most everyone to suppose that there had that Einstein made his single most dra- to be a special all-pervading (and as yet matic move: he criticized the very idea 42 Dædalus Spring 2003 of time as it was usually understood. In tion; it flowed in the “Sensorium of Einstein, particular, he relentlessly pursued the God.” Poincaré & modernity meaning of ‘simultaneity.’ Only by criti- cizing the foundational notions of time plg: Just by demanding a conventional and space could one bring the pieces of clock-and-signal-based procedure to ½x the theory–that the laws of physics simultaneity, Einstein was breaking with were the same in all constantly moving the Newtonian idea of time. For New- frames; that light traveled at the same ton, there was absolute, true, mathemat- speed regardless of its source–into har- ical time that ticked ever-constantly the mony. And this is where the trains and same way for all observers. Clocks–all clocks enter. Suppose, Einstein rea- kinds–were only pale reflections, ap- soned, that you wanted to know what proximations to this metaphysical tem- time a train arrived in a train station. porality. But Einstein’s departure from Easy enough: you see where the hand of Newtonian time went further, since once your watch is at the time the engine pulls Einstein’s starting points are accepted, up alongside you. But what if you want- dramatic consequences follow. For in- ed to know when a train was pulling into stance, if a train travels through our sta- a distant station? How do you know tion and the engineer and caboose driver whether an event here is simultaneous flash their lanterns towards the center of with an event there? Einstein insisted the train (at what we in the station judge that we need a simultaneity-½xing pro- to be simultaneous moments), we can cedure, a de½nite system of exchanging ask what happens in the train. We on the signals between the stations that would station platform say: The mid-train con- take into account the time it took for the ductor moves towards the site where the signal to get from one station to another. engine driver had flashed his lantern and By pursuing this insight, Einstein discov- away from the site where the caboose ered that two events that were simulta- tender had flashed her lamp. So (say we neous in one frame of reference would station-based observers) the middle not be simultaneous in another. More- conductor receives the engine flash ½rst. over, since a length measurement in- Since by assumption the middle conduc- volves determining the position of the tor measures the two flashes as moving front and back of an object at the same at equal velocities from equally separat- time, the relativity of simultaneity meant ed points of origin, he concludes–as that length was relative as well. By remov- night follows day–that the two flashes ing the absolutes of space and time, Ein- were not sent simultaneously. So the two stein restructured modern physics. flashes that were simultaneous in the station frame are not simultaneous in the dgb: So what was at stake here was not moving one. Simultaneity is relative to a only the universal ether, the substrate of frame of reference; it is not absolute. the cosmos, but also time–that absolute, From an apparently prosaic starting ever-unrolling, eternally immutable point about clocks, trains, and light sig- flowing, the Platonic time of which all nals, Einstein had smashed one of the worldly clocks were mere dilapidations. very centerpieces of classical physics. It was this time that Newton had under- stood was a necessary condition of his dgb: This is perhaps the Einstein of physics, and that he had placed beyond myth and legend, the knight-errant in the realm of merely human investiga- the borderlands of metaphysics who

Dædalus Spring 2003 43 Peter L. slays the last chimera of the crystalline plg: I was standing at a train station in Galison & D. Graham spheres. A searcher in the realm of pure northern Europe admiring a line of Burnett mind, he reconnoiters the Sensorium of clocks that went along the platform. And on God and ½nds it empty. But this image, I noticed that the minute hands were all time you would remind us, is a distortion of at the same point–I could just see them Einstein’s character, of what he thought all lined up. I thought, “These are won- he had done, and of his approach to derful clocks; isn’t that impressive that problems as well, no? they can make them to hold such regu- larity?” Then I noticed that the second plg: Einstein, without any doubt, is the hands were clicking in synchrony too, best-known scientist ever, and he occu- which was startling, and I thought, pies an astonishingly robust cultural “These can’t be that accurate–you can’t place. He doesn’t seem to come into and have clocks running like this that are not fall out of fashion as much as he is sim- synchronized in some way, or else they’d ply appropriated for new purposes with get out of phase.” Suddenly I wondered each generation. But one of the perenni- if Einstein had paid attention to syn- al features of Einstein-the-icon is the chronized clocks in train stations. If he ½gure of the great mind living in a world had, it would give a very tangible sense apart, the ultimate loner. No doubt Ein- to that most famous of all scienti½c stein himself is in some measure respon- thought experiments in his 1905 paper. It sible for this image, since, in later life, he would make his move towards a criti- reflected nostalgically on solitude, isola- cism of absolute time both ½gurative and tion, and creativity. For instance, he literal. So I went back and I started pok- wrote wistfully of the lighthouse atten- ing around–and found myself in the dant, whose world could be that of un- midst of an absolutely immense litera- distracted thought. So we think of him ture on ½n-de-siècle timekeeping and as the person who could not quite navi- clocks. As you know, there was at the gate the physical world, and associate time an urgent technological problem of that incapacity with a romantic picture coordinating time along train tracks. of scienti½c genius. This in turn leads to More than that: in Europe the center of an odd rewriting of the way he lived his precision-coordinated timekeeping was life and did his work. Switzerland, and if all this industry was based in Switzerland they must have dgb: Was the patent of½ce Einstein’s been processing patents right and left. I ‘lighthouse’? went to the patent of½ce, and found myself surrounded by a huge number of plg: This has generally been the story– patents with diagrams of clocks linked Einstein at the patent of½ce is the genius by signals. There were even proposals at his day job: at best a source of bread for patents and articles in the technical and butter, at worst a distraction, but in journals about clocks linked by radio some deep way irrelevant to understand- waves. All this seemed extremely close ing his science. to the kind of materialization of time that preoccupied Einstein. Of course, dgb: When did you begin to get a differ- the clock factories and inventors had no ent idea of how the story might be told? interest in ‘frames of reference’ or in all

44 Dædalus Spring 2003 the ‘physics of the ether.’ But the impor- dinarily visible ½gure whose books Einstein, Poincaré & tance of distributing simultaneity by about science, philosophy, and morality modernity electromagnetic means was clear to were best-sellers. He also wrote dramati- everyone. Here was a technical problem cally and often about the new theory of located in Switzerland, centered in relativity to which he contributed im- Berne, and with ideas coming to a point portantly. Crucially for our understand- in Einstein’s patent of½ce. It all seemed ing of his ideas of simultaneity, Poincaré remarkable; and it is there that I began was, beginning in the early 1890s, deeply this work. involved in time-distribution networks. dgb: And yet Einstein certainly wasn’t dgb: At the Bureau des Longitudes? the only physicist at the turn of the cen- tury preoccupied with time . . . plg: Yes, where he would serve several terms as president. And this was crucial, plg: Not at all. In fact, even as I worked because the astronomers and geogra- on “Einstein in the Patent Of½ce” (and phers of the Bureau were working inten- prepared the paper you mentioned), I sively with the telegraphic transmission kept wondering, “Who else would have, of time. This was not for domestic rail- should have, been in this mix? And who road use–or at least not in the ½rst in- else from the physics community would stance. Rather, these engineers and sci- have been concerned with ideas of si- entists were working at a much higher multaneity?” There is one other person level of precision. They needed to deter- who cared about simultaneity at least as mine simultaneity so distant observers much as Einstein–and earlier–and that could determine their relative longitude. was Henri Poincaré. He certainly saw that clock coordination was essential for dgb: For cartographic purposes, since de½ning what we mean by simultaneity. longitude measurements are measure- ments of time?1 dgb: Einstein may be a household name, but the same cannot be said for plg: Precisely. Their goal was to map Poincaré. the nation, the empire, and then much of the world. Speci½cally, they aimed to plg: I suppose household name, like ½nd points of reference–for instance, in time and simultaneity, is a relative con- North Africa, Senegal, Ecuador, and cept. In France, Poincaré has long been a Vietnam–from which the further map- hero. Known for his innovations in the ping of the interiors could proceed. qualitative studies of chaotic systems, Maps were important for extraction of for his invention of the mathematical theory of topology, for his contributions 1 The earth rotates once on its axis each day, to mathematical physics, and for his phi- or 360 degrees every 24 hours, or 15 degrees every hour. Longitude is measured with respect losophy of conventionalism, Poincaré to some arbitrary zero line–say, the meridian was without any question the most re- of Paris. So if we know that the sun is directly nowned French scientist of the late nine- over our heads (it is noon where we are) and teenth and early twentieth century. And we get a telegraph message from Paris saying it that, in France, meant he was an extraor- was noon there an hour before, we know we are 15 degrees west of Paris.

Dædalus Spring 2003 45 Peter L. ores, for military domination, for the for geodetic purposes), lies the whole Galison & D. Graham cutting of roads, and the laying of rail- schematic of ‘relativistic’ physics: As Burnett road lines. Railroad lines brought in you put it in the book, “simultaneity is a on more cable, and therefore more map- convention, nothing more than the coordina- time ping, and so on. All of this constituted a tion of clocks by a crossed exchange of electro- major technical program, a great nation- magnetic signals, taking into account the al moment. And the timing is fascinat- transit time of the signal.” This is physics, ing. Poincaré really became a public ½g- but it is also technology at the turn of ure starting in 1887 or so. And by 1892 he the century. And yet, in a way, Poincaré was involved with the Bureau of Longi- isn’t the guy who ‘gets’ the physics of tude, where he tackled problems of time relativity. Or at least this is how he is conventions–from the decimalization usually remembered: He was so close, of the hour to reconciling the longitude but he turned away from the more radi- of the Paris and Greenwich observato- cal interpretation of his thinking, and ries. I remember staring at these reports the real discovery was left to Einstein, from the 1890s, trying to ½gure out what no? the Bureau’s telegraphic time-½nders were doing, and expecting that I’d ½nd plg: What Poincaré ½rst publishes, in that–as in the case of Einstein’s patent January 1898, is the idea that in principle of½ce–the ½xing of simultaneity was a simultaneity is nothing other than the fairly crude affair. But this work was exchange of signals between clocks, tak- anything but crude! Instead, I saw that ing into account the time of transfer be- by the 1890s it was altogether routine for tween the clocks of the electric signal or the astronomer-engineers to take into of light. It is a philosophical point (pub- account the time the electrical signal took to go lished in the Review of Metaphysics and from one place to another. That, I thought Morals) that is, on my reading, also –I had assumed–was exclusively a pre- deeply technological. Between 1898 and occupation of physicists and their ‘rela- 1900 he doesn’t apply the scheme to the tivity.’ But it turned out that Poincaré’s physics–he thinks of the correction to colleagues at the Bureau were precisely Newtonian physics as being too small, worried about this, and their concern is just another longitude-½nder’s ½x. And plain as day once you look at their data. the reason that he says it’s just another Columns in the of½cial reports are error is because that was how it was labeled: “time of transmission.” The being treated by his colleagues in the engineers even sent their time signals on Bureau of Longitude. Then, in late 1900, round-trips to compensate for errors. Poincaré was invited to speak at a gath- The more I looked at it, the more speci½c ering to honor H. A. Lorentz, perhaps the connections seemed. So in January the leading theoretical physicist of the 1898, when Poincaré wrote his famous day, and an innovator in the electrody- philosophical article “The Measure of namics of moving bodies. He was also an Time,” introducing the simultaneity admired friend of Poincaré’s and a father convention via the metaphor of tele- ½gure to Einstein–so Lorentz was a graphic longitude ½nders, he had in looming ½gure in late-nineteenth- mind an abstraction but also a concrete century physics. Poincaré, preparing for procedure. A procedure from next door. this event during a period when he was involved with the details of the Bureau dgb: So here, in a real material network (and still actively presenting the time of telegraphic transmissions (assembled coordination idea to philosophers), sud- 46 Dædalus Spring 2003 denly sees that he can reinterpret a pure- each other as representatives of “two Einstein, Poincaré & ly mathematical idea of time in Lor- modernities.” Would you say a little modernity entz’s physics as a physical coordination more about this tempting idea? procedure. In other words, Poincaré looks at the formal way that Lorentz has dealt plg: In the years following 1905, Ein- with the problem, and he says to him- stein and Poincaré were working on self: “No! Really, this is just the tele- many of the same problems, both at the graph problem that I had written about absolute top of the profession, both philosophically two years before!” From maintaining massive correspondence December of 1900, Poincaré put the with many of the same colleagues and time-coordination procedure into his friends (including Lorentz). Both were physics. He writes about it, and he lec- deeply interested in the philosophy of tures about the philosophical signi½- science, both were writing on the side cance of the physics of time coordina- for popular audiences. These were scien- tion. So it works out that both Poincaré tists who in many ways were very simi- and Einstein were interested in the prob- lar, and yet they did not exchange a sin- lem of the philosophical nature of time, gle postcard through the entirety of their the technical ways in which clocks could lives–and neither ever even footnoted be set to distribute time, and the physics the other’s work on space and time. It of how time should enter the theory of puts one in mind of the way that Freud electrodynamics of moving bodies. treated Nietzsche: in some ways they were too close and too alien at the same dgb: Still, physicists and historians of time. It became unbearable for Freud to physics have spilled much ink on why approach the work of his predecessor. Poincaré ‘missed’ being the ½rst to de- On special relativity neither Poincaré velop Einstein’s version of relativity– nor Einstein ever argued with the other; Poincaré was too conservative, he was they simply acted as if they lived in par- too much the mathematician. In your allel but nonintersecting universes. Now book you try to put this question aside, Poincaré is often depicted as the reac- and having situated both physicists in a tionary who was too backward to absorb broader story–a story about how simul- fully the radical thoughts of Einstein. taneity was actually produced at the turn That, I believe, is absolutely the wrong of the century, as well as its technical way of thinking about it. Both Einstein and cultural resonance–you then return and Poincaré were concerned with a new to their different perspectives in the con- and modern physics and a new and clusion. For there is still a question, isn’t modern world. Poincaré wrote essays there? Given that they’re both in this and gave many lectures about the new mix that you describe–both preoccu- mechanics, always emphasizing the pied with the “empires of time” in the enormous novelty of these changes in realms of technology, physics, and even physics. It simply is not possible to de- metaphysics–how is it that they come scribe him as simply trying to conserve, out of it with such different ‘takes’? As I to reinstate an older physics. But his idea understand it, your answer would have of what needed to be changed was dif- us put aside the idea that Einstein was ferent. It was not Einstein’s. the ‘modern’ and Poincaré fell ‘behind the times.’ In fact, you even suggest at dgb: You characterize Poincaré as an one point that we can hold them next to ‘ameliorist’ at one point.

Dædalus Spring 2003 47 Peter L. plg: Yes, I think he is. In another con- the standard meter on up. As far as Poin- Galison & D. Graham text his nephew once said of Poincaré caré was concerned, physics had often Burnett that he wanted to “½ll in the white faced crises–and in each instance had or on spaces on the maps.” That really gets at could solve the dif½culty by an applica- time something important. In much of his tion of a reparative reason. So it was work, whether it was in mathematics with space and time. These concepts had (for instance in his discovery of chaos, to be ½xed for physics to survive. Poin- where he literally made a new kind of caré’s own ideas about changing the map for mathematics, ‘Poincaré maps’), time concept would, he hoped, repair or administration (for instance in his the theory, just as space had been re- work trying to map and track the details paired by Lorentz’s assumption that of a mining accident), or geodetics (for moving objects contracted in their direc- instance in his directing the surveyors tion of motion. But Poincaré kept the who were representing the surface of the fundamental distinctions between ‘true earth), he was always trying to ½x things, time’ (in the frame of the ether) and ‘ap- to ½ll things in, with a great faith in sci- parent time’ as measured in any other ence. He was the ultimate Third Repub- frame of reference. And of course he lic French savant–a believer in progress, kept the ether–which he thought he a believer in using reason to make tech- needed for a productive, intuitive phys- nical things work, a believer in improv- ics. So, for Poincaré, the reinterpretation ing the world and solving its crises. of time was a necessary patch to keep Poincaré saw himself as ‘reforming’ time Lorentz’s theory working, one more idea to save Lorentz’s extraordinary new the- in the kit of ideas that would ½x the bro- ory. ken engine of physics.

dgb: And this comes out of his training dgb: And Einstein? as an engineer, no? Which is so impor- tant to the way you depict him . . . plg: Well, Einstein had a different pic- ture of what modern physics should be. plg: Yes, Poincaré’s modernism is Einstein had as his ideal neither a ma- exactly the modernism of the progres- chine on which we would do repairs, nor sive, late-nineteenth-century engineer– a set of assumptions that would maxi- somebody who faced all problems as mize our human convenience in assem- solvable, from the social and political to bling a theory. Instead, Einstein aimed the scienti½c and technical. He even for a reformulation of physics in which played an important technical role in ab- the order of theory itself would mirror solving Dreyfus when he reanalyzed the the order of the world. If the world of ‘proof’ that Dreyfus had authored an in- phenomena showed no observable dis- criminating sheet of paper known as the tinction between frames of reference ‘bordereau.’ Poincaré’s modernism fa- then (so Einstein believed) neither vored scienti½c-intuitive understanding should the theory: a symmetry in the (in mathematics as in the physics of the phenomena should show up as a symme- ether) and utterly avoided all reference try in the theory. ‘Apparent time’ and to the spiritual or mystical. It was a mod- ‘true time’ were terms he would never ernism that expected the French to lead utter. Einstein’s ideal of a physical theo- a rational and ultimately internationalist ry was thermodynamics, which began reformation of all manner of things from with two simple assumptions: ½rst, that

48 Dædalus Spring 2003 energy was the same; and second, that gross distortion to treat Poincaré as a Einstein, Poincaré & the disorder of a system, the ‘entropy,’ reactionary or a failed Einstein. The modernity always increased. From these starting modernism of Picasso is not the mod- points you went to town, deriving every- ernism of Pollock; and to force the very thing else from them. There was (as far different breaks with the past into a sin- as Einstein was concerned) a classical gle line of progression is to lose sight of simplicity to thermodynamics: its two history. pillars supporting all the other elements of the edi½ce. And Einstein wanted, here dgb: The irony here is that, far from and in many of his other works, to build being the wild-haired radical, Einstein is his theories out of principles in this way. revealed to be, if anything, deeply ‘clas- He too chose two starting assumptions sical’ in his conception of physics. for relativity theory: ½rst, any observer moving at a constant speed would have plg: Well, in some ways, Einstein is the the same laws of physics; second, the most classical of classical physicists. He speed of light is always constant no mat- is somebody who saw himself in a way ter how fast or in what direction the as purifying, simplifying, symmetriz- light source was moving. In order to rec- ing–bringing out elements of a less oncile these two ideas, he argued, it was baroque physics. There are many mo- necessary to put basic ideas of space and ments, famous moments, in his career, time on a defensible and nonarbitrary when he objects to the way physics has footing. So Einstein’s idea of time really turned–notably in quantum mechanics. begins at the beginning of the theory, By exploring the relationships of classi- and is necessary to get off the ground at cal physics, by deepening them, and by all–in the service of simplifying, unify- connecting different domains of thought ing, and streamlining the theory. Poin- previously held to be disjunct, Einstein, I caré’s theory was differently epistemo- believe, saw himself as a kind of radical logical, less concerned with “What can classicist. we know of an external Nature, and how can we secure that knowledge?” than dgb: And yet he was, perhaps despite with his aim of ½xing the theory such himself, a kind of time bomb in that that it correctly predicted phenomena classical tradition. while maximizing convenience. Poin- caré’s modernism aimed at an aggressive plg: I think here that Einstein’s extraor- program of technical repair; Einstein’s dinary apology to Newton–where Ein- at a purifying reformulation. Poincaré stein writes, in this odd and intimate fastened on simplicity-for-us, assiduous- way, “Newton, verzeih’ mir’”–is, in a ly avoiding reference beyond the human. sense, his coming to terms with the fact Einstein’s modernism aimed for a kind that in his pursuit of this purifying clas- of depth, a matching between represen- sical vision he disrupted it. In a way it is tation and the world not just in predic- a note to himself–a note about his own tions but deeper in the theory itself. Ein- life trajectory, a note on the transforma- stein, after all, in his later years loved to tion that resulted from an attempt to talk about how much choice God had at deepen and streamline a classical vision. the beginning of the universe (not a per- sonal God but an underlying order). dgb: One reading of your book would Poincaré never even grazed that kind of be that you think you have discovered metaphysics. All that said, it would be

Dædalus Spring 2003 49 Peter L. the ‘smoking gun’ for this very transfor- to-concrete). Instead there is an extraor- Galison & D. Graham mation, the smoking gun for nothing dinary oscillation back and forth be- Burnett less than the theory of relativity itself: tween abstraction and concreteness. I on Einstein is at his patent desk, looking at like this mix–this high-pressure interac- time diagrams of electromechanical networks tion of material technologies, philoso- for time distribution along railway lines. phy, and physics. Each was in play, in “Eureka!” he shouts, and he sits down to different ways, and ‘simultaneity’ was at demolish the idea of absolute time and stake in each domain: in Lorentz’s space. I know that you don’t care for this mathematical ‘local time,’ in the techno- reading, and you don’t think this is your logical exchange of time signals, in the story, but it will be tempting for many philosophical critique of absolute time. readers . . . In their own ways, Poincaré and Einstein were reading philosophy, working at plg: It is absolutely not how I think of technological projects, grappling with the problem–not for Poincaré, not for electrodynamics. Einstein certainly Einstein. Almost all of my work stems knew pieces of what Poincaré had done from a concern with the strange juxtapo- (how much and exactly when is a longer sition of the very abstract and the very story). Then came Poincaré’s moment in concrete. This is not a question that is by December 1900 (and Einstein’s in May any means restricted to physics, but phy- 1905) when a statement about what si- sics makes it abruptly clear how sudden- multaneity is suddenly participated in all ly we pass from symbols to materiality. three arcs–the crossing point. In Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps I want to get away from two widespread ideas: dgb: Technology, metaphysics, physics. ½rst, a notion that science proceeds by a kind of Platonic ascension, an evapora- plg: What interests me about this story tive or sublimating process that takes the is precisely that you can’t start to tell it if material into the abstract. Material rela- you think that it’s all on one scale, or all tions do not eject ideas or produce ideas is really grounded in only one of these like ripples on the surface of deep-flow- domains. Or rather you see very limited ing currents. And here coordinated pieces of it while vast blocks of the story clocks did not cause Einstein to introduce become unmotivated, even incompre- the synchronizing procedure. Telegraph- hensible. So if you tell the story of time ic longitude mapping did not force Poin- coordination as a pure history of ideas caré to the simultaneity procedure. Con- then Poincaré’s references to telegraphy versely, physics does not advance by and telegraphic longitude remain . . . pure condensation–it would be a terri- ble distortion to see physics beginning in dgb: incoherent . . . a realm of pure ideas, and then gradually acquiring the weight of materiality until plg: Incoherent, or, more precisely, they they stand in corporeal form as the ob- appear as fully abstract thought experi- jects of everyday life. So the reason that I ments, with the subject (the ground of ½nd this moment of late-nineteenth- the metaphor) chosen arbitrarily. But and early-twentieth-century contempla- what is interesting to me about it is that tion of time so interesting is that it rep- as you start to tell the story, no matter resents neither of these unilateral direc- where you start–and in some ways you tions (concrete-to-abstract or abstract- have a choice about where to begin–you

50 Dædalus Spring 2003 need the other levels. Otherwise the signal-time between them,” could func- Einstein, Poincaré & story contains arbitrary elements: Why, tion jointly in this multiplicity of trajec- modernity for example, is Poincaré publishing tories: physics, metaphysics, technology. about the same procedure for coordinat- ing time in a journal of philosophy of dgb: Where somebody was actually metaphysics and morals, in the Annals making that notion real by creating syn- of the Bureau of Longitude, and in the chronized zones, by creating coordinat- physics publications? I think that the ed clocks, even as the same proposition very quick back and forth between scales was transforming our understanding of actually points to a dimensionality of the physical world, and, perhaps, our history that simply is wiped out if you place in it. try to narrate it from a single line. This is a theme of my work, that the metaphori- plg: Exactly. In 1899, Poincaré was ar- cal and the literal are inextricable: that guing with Greenwich astronomers the literal is always referring outwards about how to get their astronomical metaphorically and the metaphorical clocks synchronized, giving a lecture in flickers back into the literal. Asking which he reinterpreted Lorentz’s time about the history of physics leads at concept, and presenting to the philoso- some key moments both to very materi- phers his arguments against absolute al circumstances and to the ethereal lay- space and time. All of this occurred es- ers of metaphysics as well. In the book, I sentially at once–no one domain drove am constantly trying to avoid the histo- the others. Precisely the simultaneity of riography of both sublimation and con- all this presents the historian with two densation. Instead, I ½nd a peculiar state great challenges. One is to show how the of vapor and water known as ‘critical domains come together. But the other is opalescence’ to be a better metaphor for to exhibit the quasi-stability of each of the relationship between the abstract these discourses, games, or traditions. and the concrete. For under particular pressure and temperature, vapor flashes dgb: And to do this we must, as you say, back into liquid and liquid into vapor at “look up to see down, and down to see every scale, from a few molecules to the up.” whole system. The light that we shine on the opalescent mixture reflects back in plg: The juxtapositions, the links–all every color, at every scale. In the late this is historical. It is now a commonplace nineteenth century, synchronized time for string theorists to think of physics was more like that: debates over syn- and algebraic geometry ‘going together’; chronizing time–debates over the con- twenty-½ve years ago that wasn’t obvi- ventionality of time itself–took place at ous at all. For those turn-of-the-century the scale of buildings, blocks, cities, decades it made perfect sense to mingle countries, and the planet, while at the machines and metaphysics. For us, same time arguments came fast and furi- perhaps, the nearness of things and ous about the philosophical and physical thoughts seems to have vanished, at basis of time. What I wanted to know– least where time is concerned. When very speci½cally–was how a simple Poincaré and Einstein looked into the proposition, “time–simultaneity–is details of electrical engineering, when nothing other than the coordination of they stared at generators, radios, and clocks, taking into account the electrical cables, they saw in them critical prob-

Dædalus Spring 2003 51 Peter L. lems of physics and philosophy. Con- through time, the myriad quirks and Galison & D. Graham versely, they could hardly consider wobbles of the cosmos? With Einstein’s Burnett philosophical questions of time and time, perhaps, that abstraction outreach- on space without asking about central fea- es itself, in a way, and collapses back time tures of physics–or technology. onto us, onto the earth, onto the contin- gencies of here and there. Does that dgb: With hindsight, we will surely dis- make sense? cover that we now have our own “philo- sophical machines.” It is tempting to say plg: You can tell that story of the earlier that the computer is for us what the physics of time, as you suggest: Time clock was for much of the history of sci- passed from a world in which the sublu- ence: a machine to think with. nary sphere was thought of as corrupt and material to another realm, beyond plg: Moments of critical opalescence in the superlunary, to the inaccessible the history of science–moments when a reaches of Newton’s pure, mathematical huge variety of scales are implicated– time. The story of the late nineteenth are not frequent. But the development of century, though, is one in which the ab- the modern computer is such a moment straction and concreteness of time are –as was the late-nineteenth-century both present. Conventionalizing time deployment of synchronized clocks. It through the exchange of signals forced simply isn’t possible to tell the story of the made-ness of time into the domain information theory, for example, with- of the visible: time zones imprinted the out invoking the history of computation. technical fabrication of simultaneity in Conversely, there can be no coherent everyday life. Physicists, philosophers, history of electronic computation with- psychologists, astronomers–all were out showing in detail how the hardware debating how to make time, how to mea- story crossed with the development of sure it precisely and ship it from place to theories of information–or theories of place. As Poincaré and Einstein inserted brain function. technical, engineered time into the phy- sics of electrodynamics, they very delib- dgb: But let’s pull back for a moment. erately set aside reference to Newtonian How does the story you tell in this book absolutes. They brought the abstract ½t with larger narratives in the history of into the concrete–not by jettisoning the clocks and timekeeping? Is Einstein’s realm of the ideas for the sun and sea- relativistic time ‘just’ time? Is it the apo- sons, but by joining the material to the theosis of the classic history of technolo- abstract. We could say that the moderni- gy story about time, that wonderful ty of time is made visible by the absence story of progressive human efforts to of time-in-itself, by the absence of time- push time up out of the dirt and the as-absolute. grass, the pulse of the blood and the or- ganic cycles of days and seasons, and to dgb: In a way, that traditional history of create instead an abstract, disembodied, time and timekeeping, particularly as ‘pure’ time–a flowing that would be cultivated by historians of science and monitored with fantastically precise technology, has been a story of the ‘de- devices, devices so precise that they mythologizing’ of time. Sure, people would become critical tools of investiga- went on using time imagery for didactic tion of nature, and reveal and measure, or symbolic functions–from vanitas

52 Dædalus Spring 2003 paintings of skulls to devotional hour- dgb: And yet–and this is so easy for the Einstein, Poincaré & glasses. But the history of time in sci- lay reader to overlook–‘relativity’ is modernity ence and technology has been the story predicated on a cosmic and universal of abstracting that pure and precisely absolute. metered flow from such accretions of ‘meaning.’ And yet, the products of such plg: Indeed–there is a great irony here, progressive puri½cations are always since Einstein preferred to see his work themselves reintegrated into the realm as ‘Invariant Theory’ but knew he could of human meaning-making. For in- not buck the worldwide trend to label it stance, the emerging concept of ‘geolog- ‘Relativity Theory.’ ical time’ in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries rapidly came to be en- dgb: So while the public seized on the tangled with systematic theology and relativity of time, what did physicists deist notions of natural law–were rocks take from Einstein’s intervention? a particular lesson in eternity? This sort of endless ‘folding’ between science and plg: The critical gaze that Einstein cast signi½cation makes me wonder: Was on the notion of time promptly put there–is there–a didactic or symbolic other concepts under the microscope. signi½cance in Einstein’s time? Einstein had made time and simultane- ity stand with, not behind, experience plg: You might approach this in two and procedure. Now physicists wanted ways. One would be to look at the speci- to know how this rebuilding of a con- ½city of the way Einstein and his physi- cept could be extended into quantum cist interlocutors treated time, and the theory: What was causality? What did it other would be to explore how time was mean for a particle to have a momentum taken up in the wider cultural sphere. and a position? Over the decades that For example, Einstein was very amused followed, physical concepts fell one after by the ‘twin paradox’ in which one twin another from a priori metaphysical travels out and back at relativistic speeds heights to the ground where they (cou- and ends up much younger than his stay- pled to other concepts) met experimen- at-home sibling (he called this “the tal inquiry. Time invariance–that a thing at its funniest”). But Einstein’s movie of the physical world should be heart was always elsewhere–his real in- playable backwards and forwards–was vestment was in the invariants he found not, it seemed, the rule of a priori law. (for example, the absolute speed of light, Nor was parity invariance (that the mir- or the identity of the laws of physics for ror reflection of phenomena should all inertial reference frame observers). always be physically possible). Now He was consistently more interested in from a distant philosophical perspective these aspects of the theory than he was one might say that the criticism of in the differing perspectives of each ob- causality, for example, was even more server on space and time. But clearly the dramatic than Einstein’s and Poincaré’s wider public was, and has remained, fas- critique of Newtonian absolute time. cinated precisely with the relativity of But the critique of time came ½rst, and time. From jokes to art and ethics, Ein- in a deep and abiding sense it guided the stein has been invoked to justify the rebuilding of physical knowledge for tenet that the most basic of concepts generations after 1905. This, I believe, is were ‘just relative.’ because the reformation of time was not

Dædalus Spring 2003 53 Peter L. just a change in a particular doctrine them–they do, we do, the strangest Galison & D. Graham (“time is better measured this way than things. It takes strange activity to bring Burnett that way”). At stake was what it meant absolutes into the contingencies and on to have a physical concept at all. localities of human life. You can be sure time that people are going to start making dgb: And at stake too was how one some very unusual gestures, and bring gains access to such a concept, no? Since out keys and locks and boxes and bury ‘abstraction’–or, as you call it, ‘sublima- things in the ground and make funny tion’–is not merely a way to tell histori- noises . . . cal stories; it is also a way to think about nature, it is a way to think about what plg: And particularly in the Third Re- science itself is and how it should be public, where religious iconology mor- done. And yet Einstein’s pursuit of time phed into scienti½c-technical procedure. leads to a simultaneous apotheosis and Time, too, was similarly concrete- inversion in the larger history of time in abstract. In the 1890s, for example, Poin- science and technology. His is an exer- caré joined a commission on the deci- cise in abstraction that is also, improba- malization of time. On one reading, this bly, a kind of rei½cation. was entirely a practical affair–railroad administrators argued passionately for plg: Understanding the history of time the simplicity that 9.56 or 22.34 o’clock always involves examining exactly that would afford by allowing travelers to cal- relationship between the abstract and culate time differences by simple sub- the concrete, and, for Einstein, under- traction. On another, though, it was en- standing time itself demanded this as tirely symbolic: a reanimation of the well. What I ½nd so remarkable about dream of rationality so passionately ad- the ½n de siècle is that not just in relativ- vocated during the French Revolution ity theory, but in the whole cultural sur- and brought to international promi- round, the categories of time and space nence through the Convention of the exhibit a kind of abstract concreteness Meter in the 1880s. Reflections on time (or concrete abstraction). When the are so often like this–practical and more French ½nally persuaded the interna- than practical, utterly utilitarian and tional community to ‘sanction’ the highly symbolic. meter in 1889, they held an elaborate cer- emony, and a ritualized ‘burial’ of the dgb: Hence, the practical utility, for standard. At the moment the assembled Newton, of a ‘physics time’ that lived in, dignitaries and scientists sealed the of all places, the Sensorium of God. Talk iridium-platinum rod in its triple-locked about practical and more than practical! chamber (and shared out the keys), this But I still wonder: Did Einstein and precisely engineered rod rose to become Poincaré bring time back to earth? Re- ‘M’–the object that could measure but move it from the realm of ½rst and ½nal not be measured. Practical? Of course; things? industrialists desperately needed a refer- ence meter. But symbolic? How could plg: Yes and no. True, they grasp time one say no? from the domain of the pure absolute. True, they rope it into procedure of elec- dgb: When people start playing with tro-chronological coordination. But they absolutes, when they start to conjure surely do not sever time from its wide

54 Dædalus Spring 2003 and deep bonds with modernity. Both dgb: ‘Grand narrative’ historians have Einstein, Poincaré & scientists’ writings on the ‘new mechan- long talked about the conflict between modernity ics’ (with its non-absolute time) were ‘church time’ and ‘merchant time’ in the widely read by artists, philosophers, and late-medieval period: the steeple clock writers. Both–though in different ways versus the factory clock. On the one –saw the relativity of time as a funda- hand the time of God, on the other the mental piece of the new physics. time of labor and money. Your story of Einstein and Poincaré, of clocks and dgb: The meaning of the clock would maps in the ½n de siècle, could be read– never be the same. playfully, I admit–as the ½nal con- frontation of these two chronometries plg: And yet, of course, clocks have of European civilization: in 1905 the never been just gears and pointers. Some Sensorium of God gets tied to the tracks were mounted in late-medieval towers, of railway time . . . establishing dominion of property and faith. In paintings they stood as harbin- plg: But modernity is not–or perhaps gers of death. By the late nineteenth cen- should I say ‘not just’–a train wreck! In- tury, mounted in factories, observato- stead, what we see in this story is that ries, and trading rooms, they stood for the great metaphors of time–trains and the modern ambitions of regulated life, maps–chosen by Einstein and Poincaré precision-mapped territory, and the in- are both the most imaginative of all stantaneity of contemporary life. It is thought experiments, and, at the same against this seven-hundred-year clock time, the most everyday technologies of history that relativity entered, and when the modern world. it did, there were certain to be no small effects.

Dædalus Spring 2003 55 Jennifer M. Groh & Michael S. Gazzaniga

How the brain keeps time

One of the keys to playing the piano– forms of delay in processing informa- or at least to playing it well–is the abili- tion. ty of the pianist to time appropriately a Computer scientists and electrical en- sequence of movements of the ½ngers. gineers have developed several different How does the brain coordinate and syn- algorithms to allow computing devices chronize such complex movements? and networks of computing devices to Obviously, it is not simple–as anyone coordinate complex tasks. By exploring who has watched a baby struggling to how these man-made systems manage to walk can attest. synchronize their operations, and then As it happens, the timing of complex comparing how computers and brains tasks poses a dilemma not just for solve analogous problems, we may gain brains, but also for computers. Neither insight into some of the solutions that brains nor computers are clocks–yet evolution has conceived to enable babies both must somehow ‘keep’ time in order to crawl–and pianists to play the most to operate properly in the face of various devilishly dif½cult of Chopin’s Études.

Jennifer M. Groh, an assistant professor at the The microprocessors at the heart of Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and in the computers employ sets of tiny transis- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences tors in silicon chips to represent infor- at Dartmouth College, studies how the brain com- mation. These transistors are wired up in putes. She is the author or co-author of numerous pairs to convey values of either 0 or 1; articles, which have appeared in such journals as other quantities are encoded by group- “Neuron,” “Current Biology,” and “The Journal ing together multiple sets of transistors of Neurophysiology.” or bits, and by representing numbers by their base-two decomposition into 1’s Michael S. Gazzaniga, a Fellow of the American and 0’s. Academy since 1997, is David T. McLaughlin In contrast, neurons represent infor- Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College mation not in sets of 1’s and 0’s but in and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuro- trains of electrical pulses known as ac- science. His research concerns how the brain en- tion potentials. Each action potential is ables mind. He is the author of “The Mind’s roughly the same size and shape, so the Past” (1998) and the editor of “The New Cogni- action potential itself contains little in- tive Neurosciences” (2000). formation. Rather, the rate at which

56 Dædalus Spring 2003 these action potentials occur is thought fore reaching the next neuron in the How the brain to be the medium for carrying informa- chain were it not for a special active pro- keeps time tion through the nervous system. Dis- cess that boosts the action potential charge rates can vary continuously, with back up to its original size periodically at information being conveyed by the a series of relay stations along the axon. length of the intervals between identical This regeneration process introduces a action potentials, rather than by discrete brief delay at each node. How far the ac- ‘on’ and ‘off’ states. In short, the brain’s tion potentials can travel before they internal language differs from that of need to be regenerated depends on the computers in two key respects: the code diameter of the axon (thicker is better) is analog, not digital, and the vocabulary and whether the axon is insulated with of that code is time, rather than voltage. myelin. Resulting conduction speeds Generally speaking, this neural code range from about 0.5–100 meters per seems to operate on a timescale in the second–fast, but not as fast as copper 1–100 millisecond range. Action poten- wire. tials last about 1 millisecond each, so the An additional factor contributing to fastest rate for a train of action poten- transmission delays in computers and tials is limited to about a thousand ac- brains involves how fast the computing tion potentials per second. In practice, elements can respond to their inputs. neurons rarely ‘½re’ at such high rates The transistors in today’s computers can for more than a few action potentials in switch between on and off within about a row; more commonly, discharge rates 5 nanoseconds of receiving an input sig- range up to the low hundreds of action nal pulse. How long it takes a neuron to potentials per second. generate an action potential varies, de- Both computers and brains routinely pending on how strong the input signal experience transmission delays, al- is and how this input signal is being gen- though at wildly different orders of mag- erated and transmitted. In the retina, the nitude. Electricity travels along wires at generation of neural activity in response roughly the speed of light (300,000 to light takes on the order of tens of mil- km/s). Thus the delays to travel the full liseconds, in part because the precipitat- length of, say, a standard computer card ing event–the absorption of a photon are on the order of nanoseconds. by a molecule of photopigment in a Although neural action potentials are light-sensitive neuron–is so small that a also electrical in nature, they do not process of biochemical ampli½cation is propagate along neural tissue at any- needed to convert this event into an thing close to the speed that electricity electrical signal. In contrast, the air pres- travels along copper wire. Neural ‘wires’ sure waves of a sound physically jostle are axons, which are essentially long, the neurons of the inner ear, causing leaky tubes of fluid attached at one end pores in the cell membrane to stretch to the main part of the neuron–the cell open or be squashed shut. The alteration body. At the other end, axons form con- in the flow of charged ions through nections, known as synapses, with recip- these pores then creates an electrical sig- ient neurons. Because axons are much nal. The resulting response latency of worse at conducting electricity than the auditory nerve can be on the order of copper wires, action potentials decay in a few milliseconds or less. size as they move down the axon. They Additional delays can be introduced at would generally die out completely be- the synaptic connections between neu-

Dædalus Spring 2003 57 Jennifer M. rons. The brain’s synapses come in two The solution works because modern mi- Groh & Michael S. basic flavors–electrical and chemical. croprocessors have a comfortable mar- Gazzaniga At electrical synapses known as gap gin of speed, and waiting for computa- on junctions, the pre- and post-synaptic tional stragglers does not pose a major time neurons are physically fused with one problem. another, and the electrical current can Given the brain’s comparative slug- pass directly between them very quickly. gishness, it seems unlikely that a syn- At chemical synapses, the arrival of an chronizing clock signal could work for it action potential triggers the release of in the same fashion. Simply conveying chemicals known as neurotransmitters this signal from a common source to dis- into a small space between the axon and tant regions of the brain could take the next neuron in the chain. The neuro- many tens of milliseconds, and the size transmitters diffuse across and bind to of this delay would vary substantially specialized receptors on the other side of depending on how far the signal had to the gap. These receptors then cause an travel, with neurons located near the electrical response in the recipient neu- clock center receiving the timing pulse ron. At excitatory synapses, the post- much sooner than more distant neurons. synaptic electrical response can help This would be a bit like trying to run a trigger a full-blown action potential, conference call via Pony Express, so it’s whereas at inhibitory synapses the post- hard to see how synchronized computa- synaptic electrical response serves to im- tions could result. What, then, might be pede the production of any action poten- the solution? tials that might otherwise be triggered The answer may be more analogous to from one of the neuron’s other synapses. an alternative method of coordinating The whole process can take between 1–5 operations known as asynchronous com- milliseconds. puting. This method has long been used by networks of computers, and recent In short, brains appear to lumber along research in computer science has fo- when compared with contemporary cused on applying the technique at the computers. Yet even computers cannot level of chip design for the next genera- solve the problem of synchronizing op- tion of microprocessors.2 When the ele- erations simply by being fast. ments of an asynchronous computer sys- To ensure that operations proceed in tem exchange information, they use the desired sequence, most modern mi- feedback to ensure that the message has croprocessors employ a central clock been received, much like a conversation that distributes a timing pulse to ensure in which the listener acknowledges the that each circuit is marching to the same speaker by nodding his head. If the send- beat. This allows the output of any one er fails to obtain con½rmation that a par- circuit to provide the input to any other ticular message has been received, that circuit in the next time step.1 This clock message is resent. This method is flexi- rate must be slow enough to allow the ble, allowing for messages to be ex- slowest operations to be completed be- changed either quickly or slowly in any fore the next set of operations begins. given instance, and it works well in con- texts like the Internet in which the speed 1 I. E. Sutherland and J. Ebergen, “Computers of the operations can vary over a large without clocks: asynchronous chips improve computer performance by letting each circuit range of time delays–exactly the situa- run as fast as it can,” Scienti½c American (August tion faced by the brain. 2002). 2 Ibid. 58 Dædalus Spring 2003 What features would be needed for a stored for later retransmission until the How the brain biological computer consisting of neu- acknowledgement is received, at which keeps time rons to implement asynchronous coor- point the message must be deleted. dination? Several critical features come Asynchronous coordination, then, to mind. First, the neural ‘hardware’ for calls for a kind of working memory oper- delivering feedback should exist, and ating at the neural level. Speci½cally, it second, neural signals should show tem- requires an ability to sustain a pattern of poral pro½les that are appropriate for neural activity for an arbitrary period of asynchronous coordination. time, following the cessation of a senso- The neural wires that could serve to ry input signal. As it happens, this pat- provide the feedback necessary for asyn- tern of neural activity–known as delay chronous coordination exist in abun- period activity–has been identi½ed in a dance. A neuroanatomical rule of thumb variety of areas of the brain thought to holds that every connection between be involved in remembering things for brain areas is bidirectional, meaning short periods of time. that some neurons will send information Consider, for example, the simple be- from area A to area B and that others will havior of looking at ½reflies on a dark send information from area B to area A. summer evening. The ½refly’s light is There are exceptions to this rule of only visible for an instant. In the fraction course, but it provides a good general of a second that it takes to plan and exe- sense of the extensive interconnected- cute an eye movement to that spot, the ness of the brain. light is often gone. But neurons in the Connections that proceed from the brain have been found to maintain the sensory periphery to the higher-order signal of where the light was located areas of the brain that are implicated in even after the light has disappeared.3 more complex processing are known as This sustained activity lasts until an eye ascending or feedforward projections. movement is made to the remembered Connections directed in the opposite di- location, and then it ceases, as if the sig- rection are known as descending or feed- nal has served its purpose and can be back projections. Even within a brain ar- discarded when it is no longer needed. ea, neurons are heavily interconnected One of the fascinating things about with one another, potentially forming delay period activity in neurons is that feedback loops at the local level. Identi- no one knows how it arises. Computer fying the speci½c roles of these connec- tions has proved tricky, because the ac- 3 L. E. Mays and D. L. Sparks, “Dissociation of tivity of individual neurons is the com- visual and saccade-related responses in superior colliculus neurons,” Journal of Neurophysiology plicated product of all of its inputs, and 43 (1980): 207–232; J. W. Gnadt and R. A. dissociating some sources of inputs from Andersen, “Memory related motor planning others is dif½cult. But it is certainly pos- activity in posterior parietal cortex of ma- sible that part of the role of these recip- caque,” Experimental Brain Research 70 (1988): rocal connections is to acknowledge 216–220; C. J. Bruce and M. E. Goldberg, “Pri- mate frontal eye ½elds. III. Maintenance of a receipt of incoming messages. spatially accurate saccade signal,” Journal of To transmit information ‘return re- Neurophysiology 64 (1990): 489–508; R. Levy ceipt requested’ implies that if the mes- and P. Goldman-Rakic, “Segregation of work- sage is not received, it ought to be resent. ing memory functions within the dorsolateral This in turn means that the message prefrontal cortex,” Experimental Brain Research must be either continually broadcast or 133 (2000): 23–32.

Dædalus Spring 2003 59 Jennifer M. transistor pairs are speci½cally designed give the brain control over the duration Groh & Michael S. to have ‘state’: they maintain their value of its activity patterns. Truncation can Gazzaniga of 0 or 1 until instructed otherwise. help keep separate signals from coincid- on However, if you dissected a typical neu- ing when they converge on higher brain time ron out of the brain, put it in a petri dish, areas. Sustaining brief signals gives neu- and activated it using a stimulating elec- rons ‘state,’ so that they can hold a bit of trode you would ½nd that its ½ring pat- information until recipient circuits are tern generally tracked that of the input ready to act on it. Saving a bit of infor- pulses you delivered–it would not keep mation until it can be responded to, and ½ring for very long after the input train then deleting it so that it is not respond- ceased. Thus, delay period activity ap- ed to twice, are both critical aspects of pears to reflect a specialization of some asynchronous coordination. neurons or circuits of neurons. In fact, the feedback pathways described above What happens if the temporal coordi- could well play a role in creating and nation of neural activity goes awry? controlling this delay period activity–a Let us return to the example of making volley of pulses will reverberate around eye movements to the remembered loca- a positive feedback loop, causing a sus- tion of a visual stimulus. Suppose that tained activity pattern in response to a the memory trace of the visual stimulus transient input. is not discarded after the eye movement Saving a message until its delivery has has been made. Scientists can arti½cially been assured is vital to asynchronous co- create this scenario using a technique ordination, but it is not the only thing known as microstimulation. This tech- that is crucial. Deletion of delivered nique, pioneered in the 1950s by Wilder messages is also critical. Possible ½nger- Pen½eld in patients undergoing surgery prints of message deletion are observ- for intractable epilepsy, involves activat- able in another ubiquitous property of ing a population of neurons in vivo using neural response pro½les, namely, the a stimulating electrode. A sustained pat- tendency to respond to a sustained input tern of neural activity, potentially mim- with a transient change in discharge icking a memory trace for the location of rate. Neurons in the visual, auditory, and a visual stimulus, can be evoked by de- somatosensory pathways frequently re- livering a sustained train of microstimu- spond most vigorously to a sensory lation pulses to one of the areas of the event right at the beginning of that brain in which neurons normally show event, and then the response rapidly de- sustained activity pending an eye move- cays. The resulting brevity of the neural ment to the remembrance of the loca- response may help keep one message tion of a real visual stimulus. This stimu- from stepping on other messages as it is lation typically triggers an eye move- sent up to higher brain areas. Many ment. But if the train of microstimula- mechanisms might account for this pat- tion is turned off too soon, the eye tern, including the possibility that inhib- movement either doesn’t occur at all, or itory feedback from these higher areas it falls short of the intended target.4 If serves to indicate that the message has 4 T. R. Stanford, E. G. Freedman, and D. L. been received. Sparks, “Site and parameters of microstimula- Sustaining a brief input signal and tion: evidence for independent effects on the truncating a prolonged one are flip sides properties of saccades evoked from the primate of the same coin. Both are necessary to superior colliculus,” Journal of Neurophysiology 76 (1996): 3360–3381.

60 Dædalus Spring 2003 the train of pulses is left on too long, a nize its computations does not necessar- How the brain second, then a third eye movement is ily shed light on what went wrong to keeps time made. In other words, continuing to trigger a particular disease or condition, broadcast the eye movement command but it may help illuminate the constella- signal even after the movement has been tion of symptoms that can result. executed once produces repeated itera- tions of the same movement.5 Perhaps both the synchronizing-clock Disorders of timing may underlie or at and asynchronous-computing algo- least contribute to the symptoms of a va- rithms described here are used in the riety of naturally occurring neurological brain in different contexts, as is the case syndromes, such as those diseases that for man-made computing systems. Or manifest themselves as some kind of perhaps the brain uses a wholly different motor impairment. For example, multi- method that we have yet to imagine. ple sclerosis involves the progressive de- Whatever the mechanism that the struction of the myelin that insulates brain employs to synchronize its opera- neural axons. This loss of insulation re- tions, when it all works swimmingly, the sults in slower conduction of action po- results are astounding. The product is tentials along axons. Early signs of ms the effortless integration of a myriad of include clumsiness, as it becomes dif½- sensory information to produce coher- cult to coordinate movements when ent thought and graceful physical action. transmission delays get out of whack. And while most of us do not achieve the Disorders of movement provide the level of manual dexterity needed to play most obvious window into the critical piano in Carnegie Hall, we do think, role of timing in producing properly or- walk, and talk–although not necessarily dered computations, because failures of in that order and not always at the same coordination are readily apparent when time. And this, given the tools that the physical actions are involved. Disorders brain has to work with, is nothing short of timing on the sensory end may be of a miracle.6 equally disruptive. Indeed, impairments in processing the temporal sequence of 6 We are indebted to B. R. Donald, K. N. Dun- bar, H. Farid, C. R. Gallistel, S. T. Grafton, sensory information are currently A. M. Groh, and M. N. Shadlen for their help- thought to contribute to dyslexia. To ful comments on an earlier version of this man- conceive of these disorders as relating to uscript. We are grateful to the following de½cits in the brain’s ability to synchro- sources for providing ½nancial support: the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (jmg), the Mc- 5 D. A. Robinson, “Eye movements evoked by Knight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience collicular stimulation in the alert monkey,” Vi- (jmg), the Whitehall Foundation (jmg), the sion Research 12 (1972): 1795–1807; P. H. Schil- John Merck Scholars Program (jmg), the ler and M. Stryker, “Single-unit recording and Of½ce of Naval Research Young Investigator stimulation in superior colliculus of the alert Program (jmg), the ejlb Foundation (jmg), rhesus monkey,” Journal of Neurophysiology 35 The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth (1972): 915–924. (jmg), and nih ns 17778-19 (msg and jmg).

Dædalus Spring 2003 61 Danielle S. Allen

The flux of time in ancient Greece

Absolute, true, and mathematical time, union is prepared. The voyagers return, of itself, and from its own nature, flows and stunningly, ½nd themselves now equably without relation to anything younger than the people whom they had external, and by another name is called left home, who arrive at the reunion duration: relative, apparent, and common wrinkled and gray. Time had slowed for time is some sensible and external the space travelers. Presumably it will (whether accurate or unequable) measure pick up its pace again, now that they are of duration by the means of motion, home. which is commonly used instead of true This ½lm assumes that its audience time . . . . thinks of time as something that flows as –Isaac Newton, Principia (1687), scholium predictably as its cartoon frames, pass- ing by everyone’s eyes at the same uni- form rate. And its animators expect to In childhood, I visited the Jet Propul- upend this expectation by dramatizing sion Labs in Pasadena, California, home Einstein’s key claim: that time is elastic, to space programs, and there, among and that it may accelerate or slow down, many other wonders, saw a short car- according to the frame of reference of toon about Einstein and relativity. A the people experiencing it. Jetsons-like family is embracing before Yet to my mind, it is the belief in the some of its members depart on a space uniformity of time, the idea that it is the vacation at the speed of light. The travel- same everywhere and always, that mer- ers look out their spaceship’s windows at its explanation. Einstein’s view of time, the starry night; the family members at by contrast, has archaic antecedents: for home go about their daily chores. A re- much of human history, people have ex- perienced the flow of time as potentially Danielle S. Allen is an associate professor in the irregular, rather than uniform. departments of classical languages and litera- The ancient Greeks, for instance, wor- tures, politics, and the Committee on Social ried about gray-haired infants and rivers Thought at the University of Chicago. She has that ran backwards. They knew that the written “The World of Prometheus: the politics of sun could disappear. Above all, they punishing in democratic Athens” (2000) and knew that human passions, especially “Talking to Strangers: on rhetoric, trust, and citi- anger, could vary the flow of time for zenship” (forthcoming). She is a 2001 Mac- each individual, making time always rel- Arthur Foundation Fellow. ative to personal experience. It was this very knowledge, I believe, that helps to 62 Dædalus Spring 2003 explain why the Athenians made clocks But when Orion and Sirius come into The flux midheaven, and rosy-½ngered Dawn sees of time a central tool of civic life. By imposing a in ancient more reliable external measure for the Arcturus, then cut off all the grape-clus- Greece passage of time, they were trying to ters, Perses, and bring them home. Show moderate the passions, and bring a due them to the sun for ten days and ten measure of order to their city.1 nights: then cover them over for ½ve, and on the sixth day draw off into vessels the Before there were sundials or water gifts of joyful Dionysus. But when the clocks–and long before there were me- Pleiades and Hyades and strong Orion chanical watches–people measured the begin to set, then remember to plough in time of day by their shadows, months by season: and so the completed year will the waxing and waning of the moon, and ½tly pass beneath the earth.2 seasons by the appearance and disap- But super½cial appearances to the con- pearance of constellations and by the trary, Hesiod’s text is not simply a farm- migrations of animals. er’s almanac. Stephanie Nelson, who is a Modern scholars have long main- farmer as well as a classicist, has pointed tained that nothing is more regular than out that learning to farm from Hesiod’s this sort of ‘natural’ time. In support of poem is about as feasible as learning to this claim, they invoke the archaic sail from Homer’s Odyssey.3 Greeks, often citing Hesiod’s Works and As in most poetry, the temporality rep- Days, among other classical sources. resented in Hesiod’s verse is not so sim- However, a closer look at the evidence ple as it ½rst seems. Here the de½ning suggests that Hesiod, like a number of feature of the human condition is a other early Greek writers, had a far sub- mutual dependence that forces human tler sense of how deeply irregular and beings into patterns of reciprocal ex- unreliable the passage of time in nature change, which unfold only through time. really is. But Perses has recently taken more than A stern older brother is the speaker of his fair share of a joint inheritance, dis- Hesiod’s eighth-century didactic poem equilibrating this system of reciprocity. of approximately eight hundred lines. In Insofar as the moral order requires the poem, he prescribes farming rou- securing this system, people must make tines to his lazy younger sibling, the sure always to do things both in the right foolish Perses, insisting above all that measure and at the right time. As Laura Perses act ‘seasonably’: Slatkin puts it, “Life can be regulated 1 My thanks especially to Laura Slatkin. This according to calculable elements, says essay originated in response to her very rich the Hesiodic tradition, and if you meas- “Measuring Authority, Authoritative Measures: ure your actions and exchanges appro- Hesiod’s Works and Days,” in L. Daston and F. priately you can recapitulate that or- Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chi- der.”4 So the speaker gives Perses a lec- cago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The reading of Hesiod I present here is largely de- rivative from that essay. Cf. Stephanie A. Nel- 2 Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 609–617, in son, God and the Land: the Metaphysics of Farm- Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, ing in Hesiod and Vergil (New York: Oxford Uni- trans. by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge: versity Press, 1998). Also, I owe my methods of Harvard University Press, 2000 [1914]). reading Greek poetry in particular to Anne Car- son, Economy of the Unlost (Princeton, N.J.: 3 Nelson, God and the Land, 48–58, 165–169. Princeton University Press, 1999), and to Rob- ert von Hallberg. 4 Slatkin, “Measuring Authority,” 14.

Dædalus Spring 2003 63 Danielle S. ture on time, invoking the natural order restoration of equality–of more than Allen on and its seasonability, in order to give his equality, since the wrongdoer is deprived time brother a ½gure for thinking through his of part of his original substance too. This ethical obligation. is given to the victim in addition to what Signi½cantly, the idea of seasonability was his own, and in turn leads (it might upon which Hesiod’s poem depends de- be inferred) to . . . surfeit, on the part of scribes a very unstable temporal order; the former victim, who now commits after all, the speaker badgers his brother injustice on the former aggressor.”7 The always to act seasonably precisely be- seasons do not establish a secure order cause Perses has failed to do so. As in the on which human beings should model mortal world of ethics, so too in the nat- their own behavior, but themselves con- ural world. Violations of seasonability stitute the raw material of a cosmos that are possible even there–as both Anaxi- must be secured through exchanges. mander and Heraclitus agreed in the Time is responsible for negotiating centuries after Hesiod. transactions of cosmic reciprocity– In the early sixth century b.c., Anaxi- just as, in Hesiod, Perses is responsible mander made the Hesiodic idea of sea- for negotiating mortal exchange. But sonable action the basis of his cosmolo- this makes time as unreliable a ½gure as gy. He argued that the basic principle of the foolish Perses. existence is that opposites pass into each Anaximander was not the only natural other.5 Just as the heat and drought of philosopher to adopt the view that tem- summer give way before the wet and poral orders are immensely unstable. cold of winter, day gives way to night, The following Heraclitan aphorism has a then again night to day. This pattern of similar force: “The sun will not trans- one element giving way to another was, gress his measures. If he does, the Furies, in his view, best understood as a pattern ministers of Justice, will ½nd him out.”8 of judicial reciprocity. He wrote: “And As with so many of Heraclitus’s remarks, the source of coming-to-be for existing the statement is constructed as a riddle things is that into which destruction, or paradox. It opens with an assertion of too, happens ‘according to necessity’; the absolute regularity of time–but a for they pay penalty and reciprocal retri- description of the measures that will fol- bution to each other for their injustice low if any irregularity should occur according to the assessment of time (tên abuts this con½dent claim. The second tou chronou taxin).”6 sentence transforms the ½rst from an The idea behind Anaximander’s pas- indicative statement of fact into some- sage must be that any given state of the thing more like an optative expression of world (of dry heat, for instance) would desire: not merely, “the sun will not endure eternally but for countervailing transgress,” but “the sun will not trans- forces. “The prevalence of one substance gress [I hope].” The idea that even the at the expense of its contrary is ‘injus- sun will be punished for transgressions tice,’ and a reaction takes place through shores up the hope of the ½rst sentence, the infliction of punishment by the and relies on the logic of deterrence to transform a wish into a fact. 5 G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The PreSocratic Phi- 7 Ibid., 119. losophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 104–138. 8 Fragment 44 in Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge 6 Ibid., fragment 103, 105–108. University Press, [1979] 1999), 48–49.

64 Dædalus Spring 2003 The aphorism is in fact an only mini- men, the seasons of our lives are truly The flux 10 of time mally inflected statement of what we out of joint.” in ancient can presume to have been the psycho- The Athenian playwright Euripides Greece logical stance out of which the Hesiodic (c. 484–406 b.c.) alludes to the same speaker fashioned his lines to Perses: alarming possibility–that the direction “My brother will not do me wrong. If he of time can be reversed–in the Medea. does, the Furies will ½nd him out.” But There the chorus considers Jason’s viola- Perses did do him wrong, and so now the tion of his oath to his wife to be funda- Furies, cast in the form of the poet’s reg- mentally disruptive of a moral order ular measures, must ½nd him out. Just as based on promise-keeping. They lament: Hesiod wishes to set the ministers of jus- “Backward to their sources flow the tice on a transgressive second son, so streams of holy rivers, and the order of Heraclitus would set them on the sun all things is reversed: Men’s thoughts itself. have become deceitful and their oaths by Anaximander and Heraclitus, then, are the gods do not hold fast.”11 as explicit as Hesiod about their worry The moral is clear. In Slatkin’s sum- that time may be as insecure and irregu- mary of Hesiod: “[T]o observe the due lar as human systems of reciprocity. And sequence of things–to pay attention to Works and Days does not merely worry, the calendar–is not only to bring tem- allusively, about the parallel instabilities porality, that inescapable fact of our of moral and temporal orders. Hesiod lives, in some small way under control, poses the problem bluntly when he gives but it is also to resist such moral chaos as an account of the history of humankind is envisaged for the end of the Fifth age, as divided into ½ve ages. His own age is the age of iron–our own.”12 the age of iron: The inverse is also true. To resist such moral chaos as seems to characterize our For now truly is a race of iron, and men own iron age is to bring temporality un- never rest from labor and sorrow by day, der control, ensuring that rivers will not and from perishing by night; and the gods run backwards, that babes will not be will give them sore cares . . . . And Zeus will born gray, that the sun will not trans- destroy this race of mortal men also when gress its bounds. they come to have grey hair on their tem- ples at birth.9 The sun will not transgress his mea- If the people of the iron age, like Perses, sures, Heraclitus wrote. But of course the fail at their obligation to act in the right sun regularly does. Eclipses occur, and time and with right measure, the moral every so often the sun disappears from and temporal orders will both collapse. view. Pre-Socratic philosophers made “The sign of the last stage of corruption various attempts to explain its disap- among mortals, when they have become pearance: the sun had, perhaps, stepped so degenerate that Zeus will destroy accidentally into a hole while making its them, is a stunning one: the mark of their corruption is that their timing is out 10 Slatkin, “Measuring Authority,” 15. of synch . . . . When newborns look like old 11 Medea 410–414, Euripides, ed. and trans. by D. Kovacs (Cambridge: Harvard University 9 Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 174–181, in Press, 1994). Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, trans. by Evelyn-White. 12 Slatkin, “Measuring Authority,” 15–16.

Dædalus Spring 2003 65 Danielle S. circuit? The bowl he was riding in had for salty homes and the crashing breakers Allen 13 of the deep sea on been turned away from earth? time If one counts time by days, what’s to have grown more beloved to those beasts be done when the sun is suddenly gone? than earth Precisely because the natural world was and upon those waves the wooded hills 15 the basis of their temporal measures, the In Hesiod, moral degeneracy led to early Greeks were hypersensitive to the temporal implosion. Here the opposite very real possibility of ruptures and dis- occurs. An eclipse of the sun leads to the turbances in this order. They could not complete collapse of all the boundaries simply plot moral ideals off of some that had kept things in their appropriate ½xed natural grid, for no such grid exists. places. Instead, early Greek thinkers identi½ed If the poet had been a natural philoso- points of instability in both the natural pher, the fragment might count as a and the political order and believed that whole thought, paraphrasable as: collapses in either could destabilize the “There was an eclipse; therefore all or- other. ders, moral and natural, came undone.” One of the earliest and most revealing But we are listening not to an astrono- Greek texts about the uncertainty of mer, not to a didactic older brother temporal orders and the close relation- preaching to a greedy sibling, not even ship of that uncertainty to moral dif½- simply to the persona of the poet. The culty is a fragment from the archaic poet voice instead, as Aristotle tells us–and Archilochus. Paros, where Archilochus this is all he tells us of the matter (Rhet- was born, experienced a total eclipse in oric 14418b28)–belongs to a father ag- 648 b c 14 . . This poem turns on the ½gure grieved at his daughter’s behavior with a of the eclipse. Here is all we have of it: suitor. The paraphrasable theme of the Take all the world’s crud; in it there’s poem–that eclipse brings about the end nothing beyond belief of order–does not in fact exhaust its or consternation or oath now that the commentary on time; the basic function Olympian father, Zeus, of the poem is rather to draw a tight link has from day worked night, pickpocketing between human psychology and tempo- the light ral experience. of a burning sun. Terror pools in mortals. The poem of Archilochus begins from an emotion motivated by a moment of From here on out husbands and fathers betrayal. Its dramatic chronology moves should believe from that betrayal to the emotional re- the unbelievable. Let none of you sponse and only then to the eclipse, the ever again marvel at what he walks in on, implosion of natural orders, and the im- plicit castigation of a disintegrating not even if four-footed beasts are moral order, ½gured through despair swapping with dolphins about a natural world where animals and plants are expected to keep to their prop-

13 Kirk and Raven, The PreSocratic Philosophers, 174–175, 203. Also Anaxagoras and Empedocles 15 The translation is my own. The poem does knew the right answer, Ibid., 334–335. not have a title in the Greek. I have also taken a liberty with the phrase “what he walks in on”; 14 David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry (Bris- the Greek would more literally be “what he tol: Bristol Classical Press, [1967] 1982), 155. sees, looking on.”

66 Dædalus Spring 2003 er places but no longer do. In this, the amount of real time within a story of ex- The flux of time poem does not record the real eclipse tended historical sweep into a very in ancient through which Archilochus lived, but lengthy chunk of narrative and poetic Greece the effect of strong emotions on our ex- time. Even professional classicists are perience of time–whether it seems to apt to refer to the Iliad as a book about rush or stand still. the Trojan War, the Greeks’ famous Because this little poem is a dramatic decade-long attempt to ruin Troy in re- monologue that originates in an emo- taliation for Paris’s abduction/seduction tional response to a personal crisis, one of Helen. And yet the poem, which re- would expect the piece as a whole to quires roughly twenty-½ve hours of per- convey the full run of the motivating formance time, covers only ½fty-three emotion. The trochaic meter of the days of that ten-year war.16 What’s poem, which regularizes time, takes a more, of those ½fty-three days, only real measure of the experience of time’s fourteen are actually narrated in detail. standing still, giving the audience access, The others pass in a line: “Nine days the in precise temporal terms, to the feelings arrows of god swept through the army” the speaker has had. (devastating the Greeks with plague); But since the end of the poem no long- “but now as the twelfth dawn after this er exists, the reader is caught in the mo- shone clear the gods who live forever mentary psychological experience of marched home to Olympus,” (after their time standing still, ½gured by the vacation in Ethiopia). eclipse: we are not able to experience the How do we know that the action nar- precise span of time allotted by Archilo- rated in the Iliad takes ½fty-three days chus to its stoppage. If one takes this (and only fourteen of real action), and fragment as part of a dramatic moment, that the action of the Odyssey takes forty rather than as a statement of natural phi- days (eighteen of real action)? It is no losophy, the reader feels its incomple- accident that the phrase “rosy-½ngered tion, and in so doing, feels out of sync dawn” comes quick to the tongue when with time. In putting a precise measure someone mentions Homer; the bards of on the stoppage of time, the complete each poem are remarkably precise in giv- poem would, I presume, have worked to ing us temporal markers. Rosy-½ngered reintegrate speaker and audience into dawn and her sisters–for instance, time’s more ordinary flow. “dawn who sits on her golden throne”– As in the Archilochus fragment, Greek constitute the poems’ major organiza- poetry often took upon itself the job of tional device. The epithets seem retro- rendering the variety of temporal experi- spectively, to the casual reader, like the ences that, because of the topsy-turvy tick of a metronome, setting a regular nature of our emotional lives, character- pace through the course of the epic nar- izes human life. rative: sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset. What could be more regular than that? Homeric epic provides the most pow- But in fact the repeated tick of the epi- erful example of the Greek interest in thets is not at all regular, in terms of real the instability and elasticity of time. As time. In the epics, no day is equal in Aristotle noted (Poetics 1459a30ff ), a cru- cial formal feature that binds the Iliad 16 These ½gures and the rest of those that fol- low for the Iliad derive from Oliver Taplin, and the Odyssey as examples of the same Homeric Soundings (New York: Oxford Univer- genre is that each converts a very small sity Press, 1992), 11–31.

Dædalus Spring 2003 67 Danielle S. length to any other; dawn comes some- And then time speeds up again. The Allen on times quickly and sometimes only after a remaining twenty-four days of the tale, time very long stretch of text. Her rose- of which only four are narrated in detail, colored ½ngers do touch the earth re- pass in about an hour and a half of per- peatedly–there are no eclipses in either formance time, at roughly the same rate poem–but one cannot predict the as the ½rst four days of the tale. length of any given day when the dawn The longest day is the moment of the rises. Let me concentrate on the Iliad to greatest crisis, when Achilles still will provide examples of this. not ½ght and the battle is at its ½ercest. In the Iliad, the ½rst four days of real The day, like the warring, goes on and action (plus nineteen days of action that on. Agamemnon is wounded; the Tro- pass in a line) take 611 lines, or, roughly, jans press near the ships; Achilles watch- an hour and a half of performance time. es it all, occasionally making a comment The ½fth day, in contrast, takes almost to his friend Patroclus. six hours of performance time, or ½ve At last Patroclus can stand the expan- and three-quarters books of the epic. sion of time no longer. He begs Achilles This is the ½rst day of ½ghting after to send him to battle quickly (ôka); he Achilles has withdrawn from the war, cannot bear Achilles’ intractable pa- and during it Hector, whom Achilles will tience. He must join the temporal order eventually kill, ½ghts Ajax instead. In of the men ½ghting on the plains. other words, this day will feel to an audi- He comes to Achilles in tears and lays ence almost sixteen times as long as any out the situation: Diomedes is brought of the ½rst days. down, Odysseus and Agamemnon are From the sixth through the eighth day, wounded, Eurypylus is wounded too. the pace quickens again–both sides pick “But you are intractable, Achilles! Pray up their dead; the Greeks swiftly build a god such anger never seizes me, such defensive wall and ditch; there is anoth- rage you nurse . . . . at least send me into er short battle. These events take rough- battle, quickly.”17 Patroclus insists that ly two hours of performance time. the moment is right for a quick re- And then we hit the longest day of all sponse; his entrance to the ½ghting is, he in the Iliad: the day of Hector’s triumph is sure, seasonable. So Achilles sends on the battle½eld that ends also in Patro- Patroclus, and this long day continues clus’s death. This single day of Achilles’ until Patroclus is dead. greatest loss stretches out for seven and Any number of commentators talk a half books, or almost nine perform- about time’s seeming to stop during this ance hours, so listeners and readers ex- epic day. Here it is important to remem- perience it as about twenty-½ve times as ber that Greek meter was quantitative: long as any one of the ½rst four days any given epic line, written in dactylic passed in the tale. hexameter, ought to have taken essen- The longest day is followed by a night tially the same amount of real time to in which arms are fashioned for Achilles, perform as any other, and so the poem in and then by one more lengthy day of fact establishes a ½xed grid of reference ½ghting–this time resulting in Achilles’ against which to convey the total vari- slaughter and mutilation of Hector. This ability of individual temporal experi- day takes just over four books, or ½ve ence. Greek poetry regularized time, hours of performance time. 17 Iliad 16.29–30, 38, trans. R. Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 413.

68 Dædalus Spring 2003 precisely as it was underscoring how The sensitivity of archaic Greek poets The flux of time widely individual’s subjective experi- to the elasticity of lived temporal experi- in ancient ences of time diverge. ence leads to a neat formulation of a ba- Greece The central poetic effect of the Iliad is sic problem of human interaction and of to render time’s elasticity. It speeds up politics. Anger, and other emotions, puts and slows down, in our experience of it. people out of sync with each other, in And in the Iliad, the causes of all these part because when time flows differently changes are one man’s emotions: “Sing, for particular people within any commu- muse, of the wrath of Achilles.” So be- nity, their actions will, to each other, gins the Iliad, and then we get, for twen- seem unseasonable, out of joint. ty-½ve performance hours, a remarkably The dif½cult project of justice is not precise calibration of the different merely to settle conflicts, but also to speeds at which time can flow when in- equilibrate people’s sense of temporal flected through the experience of fury. propriety. If the Furies are indeed left Achilles’ anger lasts forty-one days with the task of restoring temporal or- (the remaining twelve of the poem are der, we should despair of the assign- given over to the burial of Hector), or for ment, for anger does the opposite of cali- about twenty-three hours of narrative brating and harmonizing time. As long time. And within that twenty-three-hour as the Furies are the masters of time, span, time sometimes speeds up–during there will be no regularity in it. Heracli- the arguments with Agamemnon and tus’s claim that the Furies will correct the reconciliation with Priam–and the sun’s transgressions, like his famous slows down–during the period that he remark that one never steps into the most strenuously resists the plea that he same river twice, describes the all- return to battle. pervasiveness of change. Nothing can Just as Archilochus’s small poem is calibrate time such that it is the same meant to ½gure, in poetic meters, the ex- everywhere for everyone. The sun will perience of time’s stopping, the Iliad not transgress his measures, but every- measures the temporal contours of one else will, and they will make time wrath. Importantly, it also depicts the seem in½nitely various to each other, degree to which human conflicts arise with each person’s anger being directed out of characters’ competing sense of at restoring the temporal order that what’s appropriate when. “Isn’t it time seems natural to him. Thus we get also to go back to war, Achilles?” says Patro- Heraclitus’s statement about time’s arbi- clus. “No, not yet,” says the angry trariness: “Time (aiôn) is youth playing, ½ghter. moving pieces in a board game, and he holds the king piece.”18 The problem of doing things in the Several of the loveliest extant Greek right season, which Hesiod put to us in vases depict Achilles playing a board Works and Days, is not pressed on us by 18 Fragment 94 in Kahn, The Art and Thought of nature nearly so much as by our pas- Heraclitus, 70–71. I offer my own translation sions, and by the degree to which emo- and interpretation here, drawing conceptually tions put people out of joint with each on Leslie Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: other. Heraclitus had assigned the job of The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Prince- ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), regulating the sun’s progress to the Fu- 254–274. My translation also depends on my ries, whom he called ministers of justice. own conviction that men could be called pais in But how can they be, when they do the Greece, up until the time of their marriage. opposite of regularizing time? This is a controversial position. On the ambi- Dædalus Spring 2003 69 Danielle S. game with Ajax during his ‘long’ ab- Like characters in epic and Hesiodic Allen on sence from the war. poetry, the Athenians measured time ac- time cording to changes in the natural world. Archaic Greek poets and philosophers They gauged the time of day according located the source of time’s elasticity in to their shadows and, well into the the human psyche, and in anger in par- fourth century, used expressions like ticular. How, then, did the Greeks never- “when the agora is full” and “before the theless manage to forge a sense of time agora is emptied.” Their interest in that was regular and uniform? clocks ½rst arose around the 430s, as far Take the case of Athens. By the end of as the evidence goes. Meton, an astrono- the fourth century b.c., the city had, mer working with time measurement, is right in the middle of the agora, a big reported to have erected a sundial on the public clock that divided every stretch of Pnyx, the hill where the Athenian as- daylight into twelve hours. Time was sembly met.20 And from this same peri- still elastic–the twelve hours of a winter od we have our ½rst extant references to day would be shorter than the twelve the use of a water clock, or klepsydra, in hours of a summer’s day. But nonethe- the courts to time speeches (in Aristo- less something important had happened. phanes’ Acharnians of 426/5). The word for hour by the end of the It is not known whether the sundial on fourth century was hora; earlier this the Pnyx would have measured the sun’s same word had meant ‘season’ and, progress during a given day, or only its derivatively, ‘½tting or appointed time.’ course over a year, but it must have been Over the course of their democracy, a largely ornamental device. It would the Athenians’ conception of time had have been of use only on the forty as- evolved from an orientation toward sea- sembly days per year, and then only to sonability, and so toward the in½nite those six thousand residents of the city- variability of judgment inflected by state, out of roughly two hundred thou- emotion, to a focus on hours as abstract sand who attended the assembly. Also, measures of time itself. How did this all assembly meetings ran from sunup to change from the idea of the seasonable sundown, so no clock was necessary for to that of the hour come about?19 starting or concluding business. The wa- ter clock was the timepiece that counted, guity of the line between pais (youth) and aner and this seems to be con½rmed by the (man), see Gloria Ferrari, Figures of Speech: Men fact that when the city did decide to in- and Maidens in Ancient Greece (Chicago: Univer- stall a clock in a prominent location in sity of Chicago Press, 2002), 127–138. For a an agora, where it would be available to beardless Achilles, there is “Sosias cup”: Attic red-½gure kylix interior. Berlin, Bildarchiv everyone, male and female, free and Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Antikensammlung, slave, it built a giant stone water clock Staatliche Museen zu Berlin F 2278 (Ferrari, with a one-thousand-liter capacity out- Figures of Speech, ½g. 130).

19 The rest of the argument in this essay draws metheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic heavily on arguments I have made in “A Sched- Athens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University ule of Boundaries: An Exploration, Launched Press, 2000). from the Water-Clock, of Athenian Time,” Greece and Rome (43) (1996): 157–168; in “Pun- 20 Robert Flacelière, La Vie Quotidienne en ishment in Ancient Athens,” Center for Hel- Grèce au Siècle de Périclès (Paris: Hachette, 1959), lenic Studies website, (2002); and in The World of Pro-

70 Dædalus Spring 2003 side one of the most important courts in It is tempting to see this measured-out The flux 21 of time the city. day as an early effort to measure time in ancient Though philosophers had long been abstractly. But what was measured by Greece working on the problem of time in this idea was not so much time, as the Greece, it was not a scienti½c effort to opportunity for different parties to a dis- measure natural time that led, ½nally, to pute to vent their anger. “Sing, muse,” the production of a public machine for the bard had said, “of the wrath of measuring and making ‘hours’–but Achilles,” and the muse sang for twenty- rather a political need. And it was not ½ve hours. Orators, too, wanted to sing the philosophers’ study of the heavens of their anger when they arrived in but the availability of water to ordinary court. The divided day and the water folk that enabled this cultural transfor- clocks set limits on the ability of any mation.22 particular politician to play out events According to the pseudo-Aristotelian according to the pace set by his anger. Constitution of Athens, in every courtroom The Athenians punished because three jurors were appointed by lot to someone was angry at a wrong and take charge of the water clock.23 A spe- wanted that anger dealt with. Anger was cial tool would be used to ½ll the clock so central to the Athenian experience of every time, and the water was appor- wrongdoing and redressing that court- tioned according to the types of speech- room litigants could describe laws as es- es to be given, so that equal jars of time tablishing levels of anger appropriate to were distributed to the citizens involved the offense: “Observe,” writes Demos- in a judicial case. Certain types of cases thenes, “that the laws treat the wrong- were assigned a full day, and that day doer who acts intentionally and with hu- was then divided into the different por- bris as deserving greater anger and pun- tions of the trial, with water clocks for ishment; this is reasonable because each. The divisions from the shortest while the injured party everywhere de- day of the year set the standard for all serves support, the law does not ordain days–so that a daylong trial in summer that the anger against the wrongdoer would not in fact consume all the day- should always be the same.”25 light hours–and this standard-length The centrality of anger to wrongdoing judicial day came to be known as the and punishment ensured that when all ‘measured-out’ or ‘divided’ day (hemera the parties to a case–prosecutor, defen- diamemetrêmenê).24 dant, jurors, and presiding magistrate– gathered, each would already have set- 21 The clock is still extant in the ancient agora tled into a very different and particular in Athens. See John Camp, The Athenian Agora temporal rhythm; each would have a dif- (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 112, 113, 157–159. ferent sense of how much time was nec- essary for what in the courtroom, and of 22 Water clocks and sundials seem to have come into existence simultaneously in Egpyt, 25 Demosthenes, Against Meidias, paragraphs around 1450 b.c. See E. R. Leach, “Primitive 42, 43; trans. my own. (The citation method I Time-Reckoning,” in Charles Singer, E. J. Holm- use here, with speech title and paragraph num- yard, and A. R. Hall, eds., A History of Technolo- ber, is standard across editions of the orator’s gy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 112ff. speeches. All the Demosthenes texts referred to in this note and in notes 17 and 18 are available 23 [Aristotle], Constitution of Athens, 67. in both Greek and English in the Loeb Classical Library Collection, currently published by Har- 24 Ibid. vard University Press.)

Dædalus Spring 2003 71 Danielle S. what sorts of actions would be season- adversary standing over him.”26 The Allen on able when. In Aristophanes’ Wasps, a rhetorician Demosthenes several times time chorus of recalcitrant jurors describes complained, in fact, that the water clock itself as headed to court already bearing had brought the force of necessity to three days’ worth of troublesome anger bear on his arguments. He may have had (242–244). Does it mean that they have to leave something out, he tells one jury, stored up their anger for three days? Or “because I have been forced [anagka- that they are angry enough to try to zomai] to speak with but little water.”27 stretch the matter out over a three-day And elsewhere he complains that it is period? Either way, at the level of syn- impossible to tell the whole story “with- tax, duration expresses the magnitude of in the time allotted by the present water; anger these comic jurors feel. it is necessary to discuss each question When the water clock in the court- separately.”28 The temporal license of room puts everyone on the same sched- epic and of the pursuit of seasonability ule, requiring everyone to accept the was not an option in the courts. There, same rhythms to structure their claims, the necessity of the hour of which De- the aim in fact is to restrain the very mosthenes complains replaced time’s thing that has made time relative: anger. elasticity. Aeschines describes the moment when Much later, in the ½fth century c.e., litigants must debate the penalty to be lexicographer Hesychius would gloss the imposed on a convict as being when “the Greek word for necessity, anangke, with third water is poured in [to the water the phrase ‘a judicial water clock.’29 In clock to time the speeches to be made] the standard interpretation of his gloss, about the penalty and the extent of your Hesychius is simply noting the inexora- anger (to megethos tês orgês)” (Aes. bility of time. But why then did he not 3.197). To measure time by limiting the simply gloss the word ‘necessity’ with duration of courtroom speeches was to ‘chronos’? His gloss is in fact unusually regulate anger; and to measure and sensitive to the representation of time in thereby restrain anger was to regulate Greek literature. There time was not in- time, by smoothing idiosyncrasies in the exorable, regular, or fully predictable. citizens’ experience of it. The water clock put limits on how dramatically 26 Plato, Theaetetus 172c–d, trans. M. J. Levett in M. Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato; with a human passions could set time, and so translation of Plato’s Theaetetus by M. J. Levett, human relations, out of joint. revised by Myles Burnyeat (Indianapolis: Hack- ett, 1990). he imperative, “Sing muse, of the T II wrath of Achilles,” gave the Homeric 27 Demosthenes, Against Boeotus , para- graph 38. bard license to control the flow of time. Orators also wanted such license, but 28 Demosthenes, Against Aphobus, 1.2. See also the water clock aimed to strip them of it. Demosthenes, Against Spudias, 30; Against Nicos- Plato wrote: “the man of the law-courts tratus, 33; Against Macartatus, 8; Against Stephan- I is always in a hurry when he is talking: us , 48, 86; Against Aphobus, 4, 9; Against Mei- dias, 129; Against Neaera, 20; Against Leochares, he has to speak with one eye on the 45; Against Evergus, 82; and Lysias, Against clock. Besides, he can’t make his speech- Eratosthenes, 1. es on any subject he likes, he has his 29 Lexicon, alphabetic letter alpha, entry 4234, line 1.

72 Dædalus Spring 2003 One could worry about gray haired in- and sets out servings, putting a tempting The flux of time fants and backwards running rivers. One piece of meat on top of a pile of bones, in ancient knew the sun could disappear. Human and a nasty looking piece of skin on top Greece passions could vary the flow of time for of a pile of good meat. Zeus picks the each individual, making time always rel- tempting piece and gets the pile of ative to experience and frame of refer- bones. In his anger, he hides ½re from ence. mortals, plucking the sun from the sky. Finally, it was not the sun, not Zeus, (This is a novel interpretation of the and not the Furies that established ne- story in which Zeus hides ½re, but it cessity, but the judicial water clock. Not seems justi½ed, given that in line ½fty of time as such, but “time’s assessment” Works and Days Hesiod describes the (as Anaximander had put it), the meas- event with the very verb that Archilo- uring out of time, established regular- chus, having added a pre½x, will later use ity.30 In short, Hesychius’s gloss tidily for Zeus’s eclipse, and that Aeschylus, in notes that the uniformity of time, which Prometheus Bound, will also use to denote is expressed by the idea of necessity, is the disappearance of day into night– not a fact of nature but a human inven- kruptein, apokruptein, and apokruptein.) tion. Just as angry as Zeus, Prometheus steals ½re back. But, pulled between the two We explain time to ourselves with car- great gods, time splits. toons, but the Greeks used myths. Let Zeus and Prometheus square off in a me offer you one, based on an important furious battle that lasts some ten thou- story in Hesiod, and extended to include sand years. Time is gone; natural orders the history of the water clock: can’t be counted on. Mortals are the los- A teenage Zeus and a twenty- ers. But they come up with their own something Prometheus are quarreling solution: Zeus and Prometheus had over who is going to have the most au- stolen ½re? They will steal water. thority in the cosmos. They are both in- They build themselves a water clock, vited to a handsome feast. Prometheus liberating themselves from the divine plays a trick on Zeus: he carves the meat ½re-thieves who do not care to make time uniform. The klepsydra is their in- 30 The Greek here, tên tou chronou taxin, can be vention; its name means water-thief. translated either as a subjective genitive where Time flows, as people have said for cen- “time’s assessment” means the assessment that turies: originally this was not a meta- time carries out, or as an objective genitive, phor for abstract time, but a metonym. where “time’s assessment” means that time is The gods might now and then pocket the object being assessed or measured. Here I choose the second translation. the sun, but the waters always flow.

Dædalus Spring 2003 73 Anthony Grafton

Dating history: the Renaissance & the reformation of chronology

In 1485, the Portuguese explorer Diogo To locate their particular doings in the Cão erected the Cape Cross monument longest imaginable term, that of world in what is now Namibia. He and his men history, Cão and his men simply added had long since passed the boundaries of the number of years that had passed the space that Europeans had tradition- since the birth of Christ to this biblical ally navigated. They did not and could total–which they evidently saw as ½xed, not know exactly where they were. Still, governed by an authoritative text, the they were con½dent that they knew one sort of knowledge that could be set in thing: when they had arrived. They in- stone. scribed the cross with a commemorative In the ½fteenth and sixteenth centu- message, which dated their coming, with ries, as everyone knows, European ex- a precision that boggles the modern plorers ranged the world and revolution- mind, to the year of the world 6685. ized–among many other things–the To obtain this date they used a method study of geography. They found that the as traditional as their exploits in naviga- Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, which tion were radical. The Greek text of the the world map in the great ancient atlas, Old Testament, the Septuagint, and Ptolemy’s Geography, represented as most Western world chronicles held that closed, really opened to the south. They ½fty-two hundred years had passed be- discovered unknown continents to the tween the Creation and the Incarnation. west and made contact with a vast range of societies in Africa and Asia as well as Anthony Grafton, a Fellow of the American the Americas. Gradually even the schol- Academy since 2002, is a professor of history and ars who stayed home in Europe realized chair of the Council of the Humanities at Prince- that–as Gerard Mercator put it in 1572– ton University. His books include “Forgers and Ptolemy’s work was now of merely his- Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western torical interest, and they replaced it with Scholarship” (1990), “Defenders of the Text: The more modern charts. Traditions of Humanism in an Age of Science” Explorers and scholars alike under- (1991), “The Footnote: A Curious History” stood that their new knowledge of the (1997), “Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and earth’s surface called many established Work of a Renaissance Astrologer” (1999), and beliefs into question. When Europeans two monographs on the Renaissance chronologer had known only three continents–Asia, Joseph Scaliger (1983, 1993). Europe, and Africa–they could easily

74 Dædalus Spring 2003 trace the population of each of them Whichever version of biblical chronol- Dating back to one of the three sons of Noah. ogy they accepted, scholars and sailors history But from whom did the inhabitants of normally thought that the Old Testa- the Americas descend? Why had the ment offered a detailed narrative of the Bible and the ancients not mentioned early stages of history–especially those them? Or did they? Could the newly that took place before the universal discovered land of Peru, with its gold Flood. Where the biblical text thinned mines, be the biblical Ophir that had out, as it seemed to in the ½rst millenni- supplied Solomon with his riches? Was um b.c., the ancient poets and historians it a Chinese settlement, reached by dar- chimed in, telling their tales of Troy, ing expeditions across the Paci½c? Or Athens, and Rome. These in turn set the were the Incas and the other American stage for the birth of the Savior and the peoples the children of a separate cre- beginnings of a new, Christian age. This ation? age too would end at a determinate time The new geography called much in –an eschatological date that radicals set doubt–as the Jesuit José de Acosta fa- in the immediate future, while more mously noticed when he shivered while conservative thinkers, who insisted that crossing the equator. Acosta found him- only God knew when time would have self laughing aloud at the Aristotelian an end, generally placed it within a few doctrine of the torrid zone that was still hundred years. taught, along with Ptolemy’s more accu- While the Western understanding of rate views, in colleges back home in geography expanded during the Renais- Europe. sance, then, the traditional dating of the Yet most of those who made this revo- past and future remained curiously lution in Europe’s mental spaces–ex- narrow-minded. So, at least, one might plorers like Cão and innovative intellec- think, when one stands by Cão’s monu- tuals like Mercator–for many years con- ment, now in a museum in Berlin–or tinued to accept a traditional account of when one sits in any rare book room and historical time. According to this ac- turns the leaves of most of the dozens of count, history began with the Creation chronicles and chronological textbooks of the world, as narrated in the Bible and produced between 1450 and 1700. These pictured in endless sequences of images range in size and splendor from Hart- of the Six Days of God’s work. But this mann Schedel’s massive, magni½cently was not the end of the matter, since un- illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, certainty remained about the exact dura- with its hundreds of woodcuts, some of tion of the time between the Creation them the work of the young Dürer, to and the coming of the Messiah. If one the Jesuit Denys Petau’s tiny, tight- accepted the Greek text of the Old Testa- packed, text-only On the Reckoning of ment as authoritative, the total number Time, which went through dozens of edi- of years was ½fty-two hundred; on the tions and introduced thousands of other hand, if one accepted the Hebrew schoolboys and scholars to the basic text of the Old Testament, the biblical concepts and problems of chronology. total came to around four thousand With what now looks like inexplicable years. (Thus, in the 1640s, Archbishop patience, the authors of these books James Ussher of England, treating the built and rebuilt the same basic arma- Hebrew text as authoritative, argued ture of names and dates. On illuminated that the world was created in precisely scrolls and in heavy printed folios, on 4004 b.c.) wall charts and in textbooks, they pack- Dædalus Spring 2003 75 Anthony aged history as a single genealogical tree. squads of automata, designed to teach Grafton on Rooted in the family dramas of the Old moral and theological lessons. Clock- time Testament and the Trojan War, the trunk work cocks crowed and clockwork skele- gradually branched out into the ancient tons swung their sickles, all to remind Persian, Macedonian, and Roman Em- passersby that time moved quickly, so pires. Still later, it flowered into the var- they must hurry to their places of work iegated cities and states of the Middle and worship. Smaller but equally mag- Ages. Again and again, chronologers ap- ni½cent clocks glittered and rang on ev- plied the same techniques to the materi- ery affluent family’s mantelpiece. als they assembled along the tree’s trunk Splendid as they were, moreover, these and branches. timekeeping devices were only the mate- In order to cope with the awkward dis- rial embodiment of a new consciousness crepancy between the Hebrew and of time that would, eventually, trans- Greek texts of the Old Testament, chro- form the traditional forms of dating the nologers from the thirteenth century on past. This new consciousness ½rst ap- dated the events of ancient history back- peared in the advanced mercantile cities ward from the birth of Christ, as well as of Italy and Flanders and in the wealthy forward from the Creation. By dating monasteries of England, France, and the backward, chronologers could use both Holy Roman Empire. Old men schooled computations, showing how they dif- their sons in the principle that business fered. They assured their readers that and politics alike depended on prompt- they could resolve whatever discrepan- ness. Long before Protestants appeared cies they encountered. Pocket almanacs on the scene, creating the new ethics of and wall charts, modest textbooks and the secular vocation, the Florentine writ- stately folios all taught, long before the er Leon Battista Alberti made a character unfairly notorious Archbishop Ussher in his dialogues On the Family tell the came on the scene, that the world began younger members of his family that at a particular time on a particular day “you must always watch the time.” He around 5200 or 4000 b.c., and that explained that he kept a diary of engage- scholarly examination of the evidence ments, followed it to the letter, and nev- could securely identify the exact date. er went to bed with business undone. Clock time drove workers in Europe’s Why all this interest in what Voltaire most sophisticated manufacturing enter- condemned as “the sterile science of prises, from Brunelleschi’s workshop to facts and dates, that con½nes itself to de- the Venetian arsenal. It also drove the termining the year in which some totally religious to their prayers. Old monks in- insigni½cant man was born or died”? structed novices just as rigorously as old We all know that space mattered, in this merchants instructed their apprentices age of exploration. But time mattered about the vital importance of their daily too, in early modern Europe. New de- routine. Monasteries built massive, ex- vices for measuring the passage of time pensive clocks and bells to teach astron- more exactly than ever before appeared omy and ensure that everyone woke in throughout the continent. Immense, time to pray. A new sense of time, as spectacular escapement clocks rang the something uniform, determined by the hours in every city square, indicating the stars, and accessible to human industry, phases of the moon and the movements pervaded Western culture. It found ex- of the planets. Their mechanisms did pression in every imaginable medium: more than tell time. They mobilized from the paintings that represented Op- 76 Dædalus Spring 2003 portunity with the back of her head bald, and fascination, historical time seemed Dating to the Shakespearian play in which a de- especially alluring. Ancient books–so history posed king cried out, “I wasted time, and learned men agreed–contained the keys now doth time waste me.” to the kingdom of knowledge. Only a All Europeans, northern and southern, mastery of historical time could make it Protestant and Catholic, agreed: soci- possible to set the events they described, eties that measured time accurately were the inventions they commemorated, and superior to those that did not. The impe- the philosophical systems they pre- rial ambassador to Turkey, Ogier Ghis- served on a single, coherent time line. lain de Busbecq, mocked his hosts be- No wonder, then, that chronology, the cause “they have no chronology,” and scholarly study of time past, attracted thought that Job was King Solomon’s ambitious, hard-driving thinkers. Every chamberlain, and Alexander the Great year at the Frankfurt book fair, the pub- the master of his cavalry. By contrast, lishers laid out new chronologies for when Michel de Montaigne read Lopez sale. These thick volumes, stuffed with de Gomara’s account of New Spain, he tables and larded with long quotations appreciated the sophisticated calendrics in Greek and Hebrew, offered their read- of the Aztecs. The people of the king- ers long analyses of the dates of world dom of Mexico, he concluded, “were history and the development of every clearly more civilized and skillful in the imaginable calendar. Influential scholars arts” than the other inhabitants of the wrote them: Luther and Melanchthon, Americas. Mercator and Ussher, Newton and Vico. This newfound mania for precision made Christian experts on the calendar One chronologer in particular, the rage and mourn, every year, as the Huguenot scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger Church celebrated Easter on the wrong (1540–1609), won renown for his refor- Sunday. Mother Church was in the mation of the traditional approach to wrong. Worse still, in every synagogue chronology. Working in the decades in Europe the Jews, who used a more around 1600, Scaliger relaid the techni- accurate nineteen-year luni-solar cycle, cal foundations of the ½eld. ridiculed the Christians while they As Scaliger practiced it, chronology themselves celebrated Passover on the looks startlingly remarkably modern. He correct days. Even a Christian who did treated biblical and classical texts as not understand the importance of time equally important, and read both with could hardly claim to be cultured. When historical insight and imagination. He an acquaintance asked the mild- used dateable eclipses and conjunctions mannered Protestant scholar and teach- to ½x great dates from the fall of Troy to er Philip Melanchthon why he should that of Constantinople. And he not only bother studying chronology, since the detected gaps in the historical record, peasants on his estate knew when to sow but also managed to ½ll them by aston- and when to reap without doing so, the ishing feats of historical detective work. Reformer flew into a rage. “That is un- In many cases, the works of ancient his- worthy of a doctor,” Melanchthon torians who offered vital testimony had railed: “someone should shit a turd into been lost. Ransacking ancient glossaries his doctor’s beret and stick it back on his and polemical treatises by the fathers of head.” the Church, Scaliger collected and evalu- If time and the disciplines that opened ated their fragments. He performed bib- up its mysteries inspired fear, respect, liographical and philological miracles, Dædalus Spring 2003 77 Anthony and used their results to create a coher- rarely worry how this knowledge was Grafton on ent, solid structure–basically, the one obtained. Experts in chronology–like time that scholars still use. His achievement Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford- inspired widespread excitement. It won Strevens, the authors of the magni½cent him eager, expert readers like Johannes Oxford Companion to the Year–still con- Kepler. It provoked bitter attacks from sult Scaliger and his ilk. But they also his Catholic rivals in the Jesuit order. consult primary sources unknown in the Eventually it gained him a full-time re- Renaissance, like the masses of dated search appointment–the ½rst in modern papyri discovered in Egypt in the nine- European history–at the innovative Lei- teenth and twentieth centuries that have den University. transformed our knowledge of how the If time mattered to everyone, chronol- calendars of Roman Egypt functioned. ogy mattered to all scholars. In an age of The waters of oblivion cover the ruined polymaths who mastered all the disci- towers of Renaissance chronology. plines, knew many languages, and wrote A few historians have duly celebrated more than any modern can read, chro- Scaliger’s achievement. A hundred and nology, with its varied contents and ½fty years ago the brilliant, bitter Jewish technical dif½culties, seemed the es- classicist Jacob Bernays wrote his biogra- sence of scholarship. That explains why phy and hymned his “universal erudi- Scaliger, the most arrogant as well as the tion” in phosphorescent terms. So, some most learned of men–he believed he years later, did Bernays’s eloquent Brit- was a descendant of the della Scala of ish friend Mark Pattison–who not coin- Verona, and wore the purple robes of a cidentally became the model for George prince when carrying out of½cial duties Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon. Yet even Bernays as a professor–chose to cultivate this and Pattison, who knew the learned rocky ½eld. world that Scaliger inhabited at ½rst- Formal rhetoric, it has been said, is hand, did not ½nd it easy to explain what one of the great obstacles that prevent us made his work excite his contemporaries from understanding our ancestors. We so much–much less why an ambitious have forgotten the technical canons that and brilliant scholar would have chosen they followed religiously every time they the ½eld of chronology as the one in spoke in public, and we fail to see why which to exercise his great mental pow- what now seem empty words once ers. Both of them described chronology, gripped audiences. Technical chronolo- before Scaliger transformed it, as a co- gy, in its own way, also stands between herent, unchallenging, elementary disci- us and our scholarly forebears. This pline–one whose questions and answers densely dif½cult body of scholarship were cut and dried, and whose purpose had, for its sixteenth- and seventeenth- was merely to produce simple tables of century devotees, something of the all- the Jewish kings and Roman consuls. consuming excitement that structural- “Hitherto,” wrote Pattison, “the utmost ism generated in the 1960s. But what extent of chronological skill which his- they knew as a scene of lively activity, of torians had possessed or dreamed of had construction and reconstruction, has be- been to arrange past facts in a tabular se- come a sunken city. We look up the dates ries as an aid to memory.” He and others of events in biblical or classical history, have evoked an almost pastoral picture the moment at which an eclipse took of chronology: herds of contented schol- place or the sequence of Egyptian pha- ars browse, placidly, over the same stub- raohs, online or in reference books–and ble of biblical and historical data, con- 78 Dædalus Spring 2003 structing baby books for students. Patti- chronology. Harvey noted down not a Dating son thought that it took a Scaliger– scheme of dates but a bibliography of history someone whose name had the prover- the best ancient and modern sources for bial power of Einstein’s name, in the the ½eld–clear evidence that chronolo- mid-twentieth century–to charge it gy seemed to both men to offer better with excitement, to make the pasture a questions than answers. When Scaliger city inhabited by active, irritable wrote his ½rst major work in the ½eld, crowds. On the Emendation of Chronology, in the early 1580s, he not only made many dis- Early modern readers, however, saw coveries and innovations of his own, but chronology in very different terms. For also synthesized arguments already all its appearance of coherence and sim- made by Bodin and Mercator and by plicity, the ½eld swarmed with challeng- now-forgotten chronologers like Johann ing, unsolved problems–as becomes ap- Funck and Paulus Crusius. Chronology parent when one looks away from the had already attracted the attention of decorative scrolls and wall charts and some of the most innovative thinkers into the more technical literature of the and writers in Europe. Bodin’s Italian ½eld. Jean Bodin, a French jurist who Jewish contemporary Azariah de’ Rossi brought out in 1566 a pioneering manual –whose work, in Hebrew, Christian on the method for studying history criti- scholars like Scaliger encountered rela- cally, was only one of many Renaissance tively late–labored with equal energy, thinkers who compared chronology to and quite independently, to reconcile the geography. He treated them as twin dis- evidence of the skies with that of the ciplines: “the two eyes of history,” as he classical and biblical texts, as Joanna and many others put it. Bodin insisted Weinberg has shown in her magisterial that no one could practice either of them edition of Azariah’s The Light of the Eyes. except by mastering a wide range of dis- In the middle of the sixteenth century, ciplines. Like the geographer, the chro- in other words, informed readers saw nologer had to wield not just the philo- chronology not as a ½xed textbook disci- logical and hermeneutical keys that pline but as a challenging interdiscipli- could unlock biblical texts and ancient nary study, one that swarmed with un- histories, but also the mathematical dis- solved problems. They had regarded it in cipline of astronomy. Only dated astro- the same light a hundred years before, nomical eras and eclipses, in the end, when the brilliant German astronomer could establish a ½rm framework for his- Johannes Regiomontanus corresponded torical time. Yet even astronomical data with a Ferrarese colleague, Giovanni could not solve every problem. The date Bianchini, about the dates of the Savior’s of Creation itself, for which scholars had life. And they would ½nd it even more proposed dozens of differing solutions, dif½cult a hundred years after Bodin– remained uncertain, as Bodin pointed when Catholic scholars like Martino out. His ½rst readers went through his Martini and Protestant scholars like chapter on chronology pen in hand, ea- Isaac Vossius, who agreed on very little, ger for enlightenment on what they saw found common ground in arguing, from as a dif½cult and important topic. the best available historical and astro- When Bodin came to England in the nomical evidence, that Chinese and 1580s on a diplomatic mission, the Egyptian history apparently began be- learned Cambridge scholar Gabriel Har- fore the usual dates for the universal vey put him through an interview on Flood. The textbooks existed. Sailors Dædalus Spring 2003 79 Anthony might think that chronology was simple ties (one of the great chronological con- Grafton on and uniform. But in the musty libraries troversies of the sixteenth century had time where scholars rooted in the past, the to do with the ages of Oxford and Cam- study of time seemed just as complex, bridge–a scholarly anticipation of the just as dif½cult, just as provocative and Boat Race, in which both sides claimed scary as the study of space. Trojan ancestry). Like the Indians of From the late sixteenth century on- Senapur, the Europeans of Leiden and ward, in fact, religious dissidents regu- London approached the past from many larly cited chronological evidence when different standpoints. Religious and they challenged the authority of the Bi- national, disciplinary and personal ble. The impious poet Christopher Mar- attachments shaped their views. lowe, who blasphemed against the Bible The raw materials that chronologers in London taverns, had little in common deployed, moreover, came from an im- with the pious “Christian without a mense variety of sources. Any given Church” Isaac La Peyrère, who argued in scholar attacking a single problem might a scandalous, anonymous book that ½nd himself ransacking the Bible and the there had been Men Before Adam. Yet Greek and Roman historians, thumbing both believed in the deep time of Aztec, through modern commentaries on all of Chinese, and Egyptian history, as re- these, consulting Islamic astronomical vealed by modern travelers’ accounts tables, and examining patristic and and ancient texts. And both saw it as suf- medieval chronicles–not to mention ½cient reason to reject as absurd the idea Renaissance forgeries crafted to show that the world could have come into ex- that Pope Alexander VI or the Holy istence a mere ½fty-six hundred or sixty- Roman Emperor Maximilian I could eight hundred years before their own trace his ancestry back to the rulers of day. Baruch Spinoza seems not to have ancient Egypt. Every library’s reference taken a great deal of interest in chronol- shelves for history and chronology bent ogy. Yet this purportedly mainstream under materials that could explode when form of scholarship troubled the ortho- combined, and chronology regularly dox and supplied ammunition to Spin- brought these into contact. oza’s radical allies. Suppose, for example, that a scholar tried, as many did, to ½x the exact date It is not surprising that the study of his- of Noah’s Flood. Simple reckoning of torical time proved so complex, and the ages at which each of the biblical even contradictory, in pre-modern Eu- patriarchs produced his son would not rope. The anthropologist Bernard Cohn suf½ce. As we have seen, the Hebrew and showed, in a classic article, that the Greek texts of the Old Testament dif- twentieth-century Indian villagers of fered–in this case by several hundred Senapur, not far from Benares, found years. Another source of information meaning in multiple pasts, ancient and had to be found. recent, legendary and historical, as their Everyone knew that the sun, moon, caste memberships and political situa- and planets moved uniformly, that God tions dictated. Learned Europeans, simi- had set the sun and moon in the skies to larly, used chronology to sort out a wide rule the seasons and the years. Astron- range of problems, from the origins and omers could predict their future posi- fate of the universe to the privileges of tions or compute their past ones with particular towns, convents, and universi- certainty. So the scholar might hopefully

80 Dædalus Spring 2003 consult the standard astronomical tables ionable ½eld of study. And his version of Dating of the time, the Alfonsine Tables, com- it, though powerful and provocative, history piled in Christian Spain from Islamic lasted no more than a generation, since sources. And there he would ½nd what his Jesuit rival, Denys Petau, replaced his looked like an astronomical date for the work with a more user-friendly, less Flood. This served as one of the Tables’ idiosyncratic synthesis. epochs, the ½rm dates from which their authors and readers reckoned later dates To appreciate the explosive impact of and the positions of the planets. this reformation of historical chronolo- Only one fly dis½gured the ointment– gy, we need to look backward. For like but it was a big one, and buzzed loudly. geography, chronology was an ancient The Alfonsine Tables set the Flood in 3102 scholarly discipline–one that took b.c.–a date that agreed with neither the shape long before the Renaissance, and Hebrew nor the Greek text of the Bible. that had always drawn methods and ma- Indian astronomers had taken 3102 b.c. terials from widely different traditions. as the epoch date of the Kaliyuga, the As early as the ½fth century b.c., Greek current celestial cycle. Muslim astrono- scholars compiled lists of Olympic vic- mers took over this usefully early astro- tors and priestesses of Hera, to whose nomical era, but they also transformed years they could af½x major historical its meaning, as translators so often do. events. They also tried to use astronomy Christian scholars, totally ignorant of to date earlier events. A scholar named Indian astronomy and religion, could Damastes noted that according to one not possibly know the date’s origin. Yet text, the moon rose at midnight on the some saw the date as the best one they night when the Greeks sacked Troy. He had, since it appeared in an authoritative dated the city’s fall, accordingly, to the work on astronomy. As a result, they third quarter of the lunar month in ques- struggled to explain why the evidence of tion, when the moon rises late, and this the book of the heavens departed so rad- in turn to seventeen days before the ically from Holy Writ. summer solstice. His effort and others In this intellectual situation–one in like it, now obscure and preserved only which books theoretically contained all- in scraps of lost texts, were widely powerful knowledge, but standard hand- known in antiquity. When Virgil wrote books rested in practice on historically in the Aeneid that the Greeks sailed back diverse and even contradictory founda- to Troy “tacitae per amica silentia tions–chronologers naturally came to lunae,” through the friendly silence of different conclusions. In fact, they ar- the moon, he made clear that he knew gued so vociferously, over everything exactly when Troy fell. Poets–who in from the dates of the kingdoms of Israel antiquity were often scholars in their and Judah to those of the consuls of an- own right–studied chronology. cient Rome, that their quarrels became Once Alexander the Great conquered proverbial. Everyone knew, one seven- Mesopotamia and Egypt at the end of teenth-century expert wrote to a col- the fourth century b.c., moreover, new league, that chronologers, like clocks, kinds of chronology burgeoned as soci- never agreed. eties came into close contact for the ½rst Scaliger did not invent modern time. Scholars from the conquered na- chronology. Rather, he recon½gured the tions–the Chaldean Berossus and the elements of what had long been a fash- Egyptian Manetho–drew up chronicles

Dædalus Spring 2003 81 Anthony of their kingdoms in Greek, designed to them to the Roman historical tradition, Grafton on show that their nations and cultures practiced chronology as a technical dis- time were far older than those of their mas- cipline in the Greek mode. Unable to ters, and thus to avenge their military ½nd historical records that established and political downfall in the realm of the the date of Rome’s founding beyond archive. A little later, Greek-speaking doubt, Varro asked an astrologer, Nigid- Jews did the same. ius Figulus, to infer from Romulus’s Meanwhile the Greek scholars who in- character the dates of his birth and life. habited the new city of Alexandria in Nigidius did so, using what he thought Egypt did their best to collate everything were the dates of eclipses to gain a ½x on they could learn about historical time. Rome’s early past. Eratosthenes–the Alexandrian scholar In the third and fourth century c.e., ½- now best remembered for his ingenious nally, Christian scholars set out to fuse method of measuring the earth–also all of these materials into a single struc- drew up chronological tables. These ture that would encompass Greek Olym- were widely read in a verse reworking by pic victors, Egyptian pharaohs, and Ro- Apollodorus. Already in the ancient man consuls. In late antiquity, both pa- world, geography and chronology went gans and Christians regularly undertook together, as demanding technical disci- enterprises like this one, which aimed at plines designed to put order into the ap- the creation of vast taxonomic systems parent chaos of world history. The rise encompassing, in effect, the whole of empires not only gave rise to a more world. As the Oxford classicist Oswyn cosmopolitan view of history, but pro- Murray has pointed out, Ptolemy’s Geog- moted the technical study of eras and raphy, his astrology, and the later codi½- dates. cation of Roman law all represent paral- The Romans of the late Republic and lel efforts to impose an intellectual order early Empire were as obsessed with on the world. But chronology had a spe- time, in their own way, as the Europeans cial task in addition. It had to show that of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- all of the local histories it encompassed turies. Their calendar malfunctioned ½t a single divine plan, one that led up to regularly until Julius Caesar and Augus- the uni½cation of the world by Rome tus reformed it. Their future worried and the appearance of the Messiah. Its them as well. Throughout the seismic internal structure and contents, accord- political shifts that brought the Empire ingly, were pulled and torn by contradic- into being, prophets and astrologers tions that did not affect the mapping of tried to ½x the duration of Rome’s past the earth or the codi½cation of the laws. in order to predict the moment at which Julius Africanus, a third-century schol- the city would fall. The Gauls’ sack of ar based in Rome, did pioneer work. He Rome, in which all early records had tried not only to trace the contours of perished, made the city’s early history time past, but also to reveal the patterns obscure. Sorting out the divergent tradi- of time to come, and even to ½x the date tions posed endless problems. Some Ro- of the apocalypse. But a slightly later man scholars tried to ½x their city’s past writer, Eusebius of Caesarea, used the on massive stone structures, which they materials that Africanus had collected inscribed with lists of magistrates and and other sources to establish the basic triumphs, year by year. Others, like Var- structures of Christian chronology. Para- ro, who mastered the technical disci- doxically, he also laid down the dyna- plines of Greek scholarship and applied mite that would, some centuries later, 82 Dædalus Spring 2003 destroy his creation. Aided by the bibli- could tempt a Christian scholar to fall Dating cal scholarship of Origen, who had laid away from his true religion, Jerome history out the text of the Old Testament in He- omitted Eusebius’s troubling ½rst book, brew and Greek in parallel columns, Eu- and translated only the second, which he sebius saw that the Hebrew and Greek also corrected and brought up to date. texts of the Bible disagreed on chronolo- He thus created what became the chron- gy. Accordingly, he made no effort to ological tradition in Western Europe: draw up a dated list of events from the one that taught simple Christian lessons, Creation. He divided his Chronicle, in- and used a single, coherent diagram to stead, into two books. In the ½rst he capture all of world history. It seems nat- compiled a vast amount of information, ural that later readers and users of Je- some of it quite worrying to a Christian rome’s work extended it backward to reader–for example, the deep-time the Creation, as Eusebius had refused to. chronologies of Egypt and Babylon by They were only doing to Jerome what he Manetho and Berossus. And he frankly had done to Eusebius. Latin chronology, admitted that he could not impose order accordingly, seemed safe, coherent, sim- on this troublesome, teeming body of ple–except to the few highly perceptive data. readers who bothered to ask, for exam- In the second book, by contrast, Euse- ple, why Egyptian history, in Jerome’s bius provided something that seems to version of Eusebius, began with the sev- have been new: a comparative table of enteenth, rather than the ½rst, dynasty world history from the birth of Abraham of pharaohs. The textbooks and wall onward. He laid out dynasties and lists charts of the Renaissance, like the in- of magistrates in parallel columns that scription on Diogo Cão’s cross, derived showed when states and dynasties were from Jerome’s work. born, flourished, and died. At times, six or seven nations flanked one another. In In the Greek world, however, scholars the end, however, all of them dwindled continued to read Eusebius’s entire down into the single empire of the Ro- Chronicle. Many found his inclusion of mans, which uni½ed the world in time strange material from Egypt and Meso- for the appearance of the Savior–and potamia upsetting. Some–like the Alex- ½nally, thanks to Eusebius’s patron Con- andrian scholars Panodorus and Anni- stantine, supported Christianity (though anus–tried to use astronomical infor- Eusebius could not make this point in mation to impose order on the sprawling the early versions of his work, which he mass of Eusebius’s material. Others sim- completed before Constantine’s victory ply copied it, adding critical remarks. at the Milvian Bridge). Eusebius, in ef- But it was not until the summer of 1602, fect, drew up a highly legible chart of when Scaliger discovered the remains of world history, one that adumbrates in its Eusebius in Greek, that the explosive po- form Charles Minard’s famous diagram tential of his work became clear. Scaliger of the Napoleonic army’s sufferings in realized at once that the kingdom of Russia. Egypt had begun not only before the Jerome, the biblical scholar who was Flood, but before the Creation itself. He Augustine’s contemporary, translated felt strongly tempted–as he said in mar- Eusebius’s work into Latin. Concerned ginal notes–to dismiss the new materi- with practical needs, always worried als Eusebius had collected as obviously that too much interest in pagan learning false. But he also saw that they were gen-

Dædalus Spring 2003 83 Anthony uinely old and strange. He concluded set of sources, one not discovered by a Grafton on that they were more likely the work of Calvinist. Through the later seventeenth time Egyptian and Mesopotamian scholars and eighteenth centuries, scholars ar- who had learned Greek late in life than gued relentlessly about the details of that of Greek forgers. So he published Egyptian and Chinese chronology. Their them, in 1606, to the dismay of many of intricate, sometimes violent debates his Protestant friends and the delight of dragged on for decades, and no solution many of his Catholic critics. Disquieting any of them could propose compelled information had already reached Eu- assent. Edward Gibbon, who avidly read rope, from both the New World and Chi- chronology as a boy, recalled in later life na. Learned pagan priests, it seemed, that after he steeped himself in that liter- claimed that history began long before ature, the dynasties of Egypt became his Europeans thought it had. And now Eu- “top and cricket-ball”–toys used in rope’s greatest scholar had ½shed up, combative play. Eventually, the chronol- from an ancient and impeccable source, ogers’ argument without end brought evidence that posed a radical challenge their whole ½eld–and the authority of to biblical chronology. the Bible–into widespread disrepute. In other words, Scaliger not only de- Giambattista Vico’s New Science repre- vised what became the modern disci- sented only one of many efforts to show pline of chronology; he also opened its that all detailed chronologies of ancient ancient Pandora’s box of intractable times rested on a misconception of the data about the early history of the world. nature of ancient record keeping. Vol- In geography, knowledge obtained in the taire and other philosophes, less com- great world smashed the walls of the mitted than Vico to the tradition of scholars’ hortus conclusus. In chronology, learning, turned chronology into a syn- the explosion took place in the garden, onym for sterile pedantry, a noun that when Scaliger dug up and touched off an almost demanded the adjective ‘mere.’ ancient bomb. Strong-minded dissenters, as we have Chronology, in short, is more than a seen, seized on all this new information once-fashionable discipline that has lost and used it to raise doubts about the in- its apparent urgency and interest in an errancy of the Bible. So, more surpris- age when few professional scholars see ingly, did highly respectable members of the Bible as inerrant and encyclopedias the Jesuit order. In the 1650s, Martino provide all the dates that most of us Martini drew up, in Latin, the ½rst histo- need. Once upon a time, it was both an ry of China based on a wide range of ancient and deeply curious tradition and Chinese sources, which he had read in a cutting-edge interdisciplinary ½eld of the original. Though Martini hesitated, study. In Europe’s great age of unre- in the end he argued that recorded Chi- strained, exuberant learning, it attracted nese history had begun before the Flood. the most learned writers of them all. As He felt able to do so, he made clear, be- these giants sorted the rubble of biblical cause his own teacher, Athanasius Kirch- and classical, ancient and medieval, er, had shown that the Egyptian king- Western and Eastern traditions, they dom also preceded the Flood. And built strange, fascinating new structures Kircher, in turn, had learned as much from the debris. It’s worth the dive to from Scaliger, even though as a good Je- their sunken city to gain the chance of suit he pretended to rely on a different examining what remains of these.

84 Dædalus Spring 2003 It seems safe to assume that chronolo- Dating gy will never again become fashionable. history But the history of this once compelling ½eld is a complex, all too human story that does not quite resemble any other. The ancient geographical system of Ptolemy fell apart when Diogo Cão and others found new lands and seas. The ancient chronological system of Euse- bius, by contrast, fell apart when Renais- sance scholars did their best to recon- struct it. Sometimes, even scholarship can be renewed from within.

Dædalus Spring 2003 85 J. Hillis Miller

Time in literature

But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat zel’s “Memory, Stillness, and the Tem- time? poral Imagination in Yeats’s ‘The Wild –James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake Swans at Coole’” in the Yeats Eliot Re- view.1 On the other hand, the topic seems It’s about time. All literature is about these days somewhat outmoded, old hat, time. Yet concern with time in literature vieux jeu. The most salient works in this today is untimely. It comes at the wrong area were published quite some time ago time. –among them Wyndham Lewis’s Time These two contradictory propositions and Western Man (1927), Georges Poulet’s should govern all contemporary reflec- magisterial series of four critical books tion about time in literature. called Études sur le temps humain (1950– On the one hand, an enormous and 1968), A. A. Mendilow’s Time and the continually augmenting secondary liter- Novel (1952), and, more recently, Paul Ri- ature exists on the subject of time in lit- coeur’s authoritative three-volume erature. A search of the Modern Lan- Temps et récit (Time and Narrative, 1983– guage Association of America’s Interna- 1985). Indeed, explicit concern with time tional Bibliography from 1963 to April of seems today a feature of a somewhat fad- 2002 produces twenty-one pages of ed modernism, as in Proust’s À la re- items for “time and literature.” Some of cherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), these items are trivial or irrelevant, but Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), many are on the mark. One example of Jorge Luis Borges’s Nueva refutación del the latter, of so many, is William Weit- tiempo (1947), and Samuel Beckett’s That Time (1976). J. Hillis Miller is uci Distinguished Research In these days of focus on class, race, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and gender, the subject would seem to at the University of California at Irvine. A Fellow many literary scholars far too abstract, of the American Academy since 1970, he has arti½cial, philosophical, and formalistic written widely about nineteenth- and twentieth- to be worth pursuing. Time may never- century English and American literature, compar- theless make a backdoor entry through ative literature of the same period, and literary the now ubiquitous topic of ‘history’ theory. His many books include “The Ethics of (epitomized in Fredric Jameson’s slogan Reading” (1986), “Ariadne’s Thread” (1992), “Always historicize”). But for many lit- and “Speech Acts in Literature” (2001). erary historians, history is construed as a 1 Yeats Eliot Review 16 (4) 2000: 20–30. 86 Dædalus Spring 2003 sequence of materially and socially im- er in a progressive clari½cation, as scien- Time in posed epochs (as in the notion of ‘the ti½c theories of time at least aspire to do; literature time of late capitalism’), and not in Shakespeare’s time is not Faulkner’s, nor terms of an exigent conception of the are either like Yeats’s. Each literary work temporal ‘event.’ Such a temporal event has a different time sense–even those is something irruptive and unpredict- by the same author–though a short es- able, both in its causes and effects. An say like this one will not be able to prove example is the inaugural event of the that hypothesis convincingly. composing and signing of the American Declaration of Independence–or, for The basic issue for me now is the ques- that matter, the publication of Kant’s tion of how words can be used to repre- Third Critique. It is not fortuitous that sent the subjective experience of lived my two examples are both textual. I shall time, in a different way for each work. return to this. Literature, after all, is made of words. Literary works, no one can doubt, may The basic object of literary study is reflect the philosophical, theological, or therefore linguistic in nature. The prob- scienti½c concepts of time prevalent lem, as Heidegger long ago recognized in when they were written. Much second- Sein und Zeit (1927), is that the words and ary work has been devoted to demon- ½gures for temporality in Western lan- strating, whether persuasively or not, guages are primarily spatial. They trans- these connections–for example, the in- form time into space. Time thereby es- fluence of Bergson on Virginia Woolf. capes direct representation. It is turned Nevertheless, by ‘the study of time in lit- back into an abstraction. erature’ one presumably primarily The most salient everyday example of means the investigation of the way liter- the spatialization of time is the move- ary works present in one way or another ment of the clock’s hands through space. the human experience of lived time. This Lots of clockwatching is represented in is not easy to do; doing it is not the same literature, for example in all those mys- thing as just mentioning time or at- tery stories that turn on the exact time, tempting an abstract analysis of tempo- as registered by some clock, at which the rality, human or otherwise. One would murder or something ancillary to it oc- not go to literature for scienti½c infor- curred; or as in Quentin Compson’s at- mation about time. And vice versa: the tempt to destroy clock time by tearing essays in the September 2002 issue of the hands off his watch, in William Scienti½c American devoted to time make, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). as one might expect, hardly any refer- Heidegger’s own formulation of the ences to its place in literature–aside ‘ecstasies’ of time, and his de½nition of from a few illustrative thematic citations Dasein’s temporality as a moving for- from Herrick, Marvell, and Shakespeare. ward into the future in order to come Though scientists and philosophers back to the past are no exception to the disagree about time, their goal is by sci- rule of spatializing time. Indeed, Heideg- enti½c or logical methods to reach uni- ger’s idea of ‘ecstasy’ (in the etymologi- versal and universally accepted de½ni- cal sense of standing outside) and his ½g- tions of it. By contrast, representations ure of moving forward to come back are of human time in literary works are sin- both spatial. gular, sui generis, different from all the No literal words as such exist for lived others. They do not build on one anoth- time. All terms for it in literature are

Dædalus Spring 2003 87 J. Hillis therefore in one way or another ½gura- To the last syllable of recorded time; Miller And all our yesterdays have lighted fools on tive. The strongest ½gures, it turns out, time use language itself as a form for tempo- The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief rality. candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player Expressions of the inscrutability of That struts and frets his hour upon the time have punctuated the history of stage thinking about temporality in the West. And then is heard no more. It is a tale I shall cite four of these. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Book Nine of St. Augustine’s The Con- Signifying nothing. (V.v.19–28) fessions is one of the earliest great reflec- A few years later Blaise Pascal was, in tions on the mystery of human tempo- Réflexions sur la géométrie en général (1657 rality. There Augustine asks, “What then or 1658), to de½ne ‘time’ as one of the is time?” and goes on to answer, “If no “primitive words.” ‘Time’ has neither a one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain 2 nominal de½nition nor a real de½nition it to one that asketh, I know not.” according to the distinction Pascal Augustine’s meditation on time culmi- makes between words that are used nates in a reflection on what happens as within an arbitrary code like mathemat- he repeats a psalm he knows by heart– ics and words whose validity depends on at ½rst expecting the whole, then gradu- their reference to extraverbal things. The ally, as he repeats more and more of its problem with such words as ‘time’ is words, moving them one by one back in- that they do not ensure knowledge of the to the past, into his memory of having entities they name. “It is not the case,” said them. For Augustine, human time is says Pascal, experienced and measured through the sequential syllables of a sacred poem, that all men have the same idea of the es- the psalm that he already knows before sence of the things which I showed to be he begins reciting it. impossible and useless to de½ne . . . (such Shakespeare uses a similar ½gure in as, for example, time). It is not the nature Macbeth’s great speech about lived time. of these things which I declare to be For Macbeth, time is a sequence of days known by all, but simply the relationship that stretches out in a line leading to its between the name and the thing, so that on cessation at death, ½gured as a series of hearing the expression time, all turn (or syllables making a sentence or strings of direct) the mind toward the same entity sentences, for example a speech by an [tous portent la pensée vers le même 3 actor on the stage. Time, for Macbeth, objet]. exists only as it is recorded. It is a mad, Pascal here has a touching faith that nonsensical tale, an incoherent narra- we all turn our minds toward the same tive. Such a narrative is made of pieces entity when we hear the word ‘time.’ that do not hang together, a series of syl- How would one go about verifying that? lables that do not cohere into words and As Paul de Man observes, Pascal is de- sentences: scribing a tropological turning. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow 3 Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complète, ed. Louis La- Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, fuma (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 350; and translated by Paul de Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persua- 2 Saint Augustine, The Confessions, translated sion,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej War- by Edward B. Pusey (New York: Pocket Books, minski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1951), 224. Press, 1996), 56. 88 Dædalus Spring 2003 The word ‘trope’ means, etymological- ing you into the chasm, if you stop half- Time in ly, ‘turn.’ The word ‘time’ is a trope. To way across. As Valéry writes: literature be more exact, it is a catachresis, or It is almost comical to ask oneself exactly “abusive transfer,” for something that what is the meaning of a term that one remains unknown and therefore has no uses all the time with full satisfaction. For literal name. The word ‘time’ is posited, example: I catch the word Time as it flies without authority or possibility of veri½- by. This word was absolutely limpid, pre- cation, as a ½gurative expression for cise, honest, and faithful in its service, as something unknowable. De Man’s for- long as it played its part in a proposition, mulation of the way this ‘turn’ works is and as long as it was spoken by someone succinct and precise. “Here,” he says, who wanted to say something. But here it the word does not function as a sign or a is, all by itself, seized by its wings. It takes name, as was the case in the nominal de½- revenge. It makes us believe that it has nition, but as a vector, a directional mo- more meaning than it has functions. It tion that is manifest only as a turn, since was only a means, and now it has become the target toward which it turns remains an end. It has become the object of a unknown. In other words, the sign has be- frightful philosophical desire. It changes come a trope, a substitutive relationship itself into enigma, into abyss, into tor- that has to posit a meaning whose exis- ment of thought . . . . 5 tence cannot be veri½ed, but that confers upon the sign an unavoidable signifying function.4 If time is such an enigma, and if the word ‘time’–even after the most strin- The ½nal literary assertion of time’s gent philosophical analysis–does not inscrutability that I will discuss is from give us any sense of what lived human the twentieth-century French poet and time is really like, if all words for time essayist Paul Valéry. The word ‘time,’ are doomed to be catachreses, how then says Valéry in “Poetry and Abstract can literature ½nd ways of expressing Thought,” is no problem when you just and conveying to a reader this or that of use it in any number of everyday expres- the innumerable diversi½ed experiences sions–for example in asking “What of human time? time is it?”–without thinking much Here I must make some important dis- about it. The word becomes a problem, tinctions. Critical analyses of temporali- he says, when you detach it from any ty in literature tend to fall into three cat- context, look at it in isolation, and ask egories. These correspond, more or less, yourself, as St. Augustine did, “What is to the three categories of the medieval time?” The word then becomes an un- trivium, the basis of language instruc- fathomable enigma. tion in the Middle Ages: grammar, logic, It seems to have far more meaning and rhetoric. Grammatical investiga- than the sum of its uses in ordinary lan- tions–such as Gérard Genette’s three- guage. One might compare the word to a volume Figures (1966–1972), or Harald plank over an abyss that holds your Weinrich’s Tempus (1964)–tend to con- weight without dif½culty if you step centrate on tense structures and on the briskly across it, but that breaks, plung- use in literature of terms that refer di-

4 De Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persua- 5 Paul Valéry, “Poésie et pensée abstraite,” in sion,” 56. Oeuvres (1), ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 1317; my translation.

Dædalus Spring 2003 89 J. Hillis rectly to temporal dimensions: before, Irony is de½ned by de Man, following Miller on after, then, now, etc. Logical investiga- Friedrich Schlegel, as “permanent para- time tions, such as Ricoeur’s Time and Narra- basis,” that is, as the suspension, all tive, or even Poulet’s Studies in Human along the narrative line, of narrative co- Time, focus primarily on thematic repre- herence and sense. Allegory is the sentations of temporal experience in lit- spreading out along a temporal axis, in a erature, taking the language of these rep- narrative, of the disjunctions that are ex- resentations more or less at face value. pressed punctually, in an instant, by What I call rhetorical interpretations of irony. temporality in literature–my focus in De Man’s essay ends by claiming that what follows–tend to concern them- Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma selves with the means whereby ½gura- (1839) is an “allegory of irony.” De Man tive language of certain extreme and clari½es what this means in a much later problematic sorts is used in literature to essay, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion” represent that unknowable thing, hu- (1981). After having said that “irony, like man temporality. zero, is a term that is not susceptible to The classic critical essay in this third nominal or real de½nition”–just as Pas- region of investigation is Paul de Man’s cal had claimed was the case with ‘time’ “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969). –de Man remarks that: In that essay, de Man identi½es irony and To say then, as we are actually saying, that allegory as the tropological devices of allegory (as sequential narration) is the language that can be used to convey to trope of irony (as the one is the trope of the reader a vivid sense of the enigma of zero) is to say something that is true time. Allegory is a sign to sign relation, enough but not intelligible, which also as opposed to the sign to thing relation implies that it cannot be put to work as a of symbol. In modern secular allegory, device of textual analysis.7 says de Man, the meaning of the allegor- ical signs is “not decreed by dogma”: De Man’s sentence is itself unintelligi- ble–because ultimately, or perhaps We have, instead, a relationship between from the start, neither irony, nor zero, signs in which the reference to their nor time, is intelligible, though they may respective meanings has become of sec- be ½gured. Irony and time can be ½gured ondary importance. But this relationship in literature by allegory in the de Manian between signs necessarily contains a con- sense, just as zero in mathematics is rep- stitutive temporal element; it remains resented by the one–that is, by saying necessary, if there is to be allegory, that that zero is one something, for example the allegorical sign refer to another sign the empty set. that precedes it. The meaning constituted Is all this, pace de Man, of any con- by the allegorical sign can then consist on- ceivable use in the reading of actual rep- ly in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian resentations of temporal experience in sense of the term) of a previous sign with works of literature? which it can never coincide, since it is of I move now to give some examples of the essence of this previous sign to be pure my own approach to what I would call in anteriority.6 one way or another ‘rhetorical,’ as op- 6 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” posed to grammatical or logical, repre- in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: 7 De Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” 61. University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207.

90 Dædalus Spring 2003 sentations of lived human time in litera- Faulkner was extraordinarily adept at Time in ture. Any literary narrative, it might be using spatial ½gures to express human literature argued, is a spatially arrayed allegory of temporality. Vivid, circumstantial de- temporality. I mean by this that the scriptions of ‘realistic’ events are in his words in sequence, as you read them, works used as allegories, in the de Man- follow one another across the page, one ian sense, of time. The realistic circum- by one, from the beginning to the end, in stantiality of the vehicle of the allegory a literally spatial display. The words is no bar to the allegorical function of must be read one after the other if sense the description–it is necessary to it. As is to be made of the narration, just as, for de Man says in “Pascal’s Allegory of Per- human or literary temporality, moments suasion”: in time follow one another until they The “realism” that appeals to us in the de- add up to make a story–the story, for tails of medieval art is a calligraphy rather example, of someone’s life, from begin- than a mimesis, a technical device to en- ning to end, though that story may be sure that the emblems will be correctly like a tale told by an idiot. identi½ed and decoded, not an appeal to This ½guration of temporality by the the pagan pleasures of imitation . . . . The spatial sequence of the words on the dif½culty of allegory is rather that this em- page is often, in turn, emblematized in phatic clarity of representation does not narratives by the actual journeys upon stand in the service of something that can which their characters embark. An ex- be represented.9 ample is Odysseus’s journey that forms the narrative armature of the Odyssey. In the case of Faulkner, I am claiming, Odysseus moves through time and space the something that cannot be represent- experiencing virtually endless adven- ed but that is nevertheless allegorically tures that keep putting off the moment ‘stood for,’ alluded to, catachrestically when he will reach home and Penelope’s named, is human time. arms, just as the reader makes his or her The primary vehicle of Faulkner’s alle- way through book after book of the nar- gorical expression of time is the move- ration–just as Homer’s hearers followed ment of human bodies through space. it from moment to moment as he recited Such movements organize whole novels it. by Faulkner, such as the antithetical movements of Lena Grove and Joe Let me exemplify this spatial allegoriz- Christmas that structure the double plot ing of temporality by way of William of Light in August (1932), or the journey to Faulkner’s novels. Trying to convey bring the cof½n containing Addie Bun- through narration the experience of dren’s body to the cemetery and bury it temporality was clearly one of Faulk- that her family makes in As I Lay Dying ner’s most abiding concerns. As Jean- (1930). In both cases, death is the end- Paul Sartre put this, “Faulkner’s meta- point of human time, though in different physics is a metaphysics of time.”8 ways in the two novels. The representation of human time in 8 Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) Time in the Work of William Faulkner,” in Lit- is too complex for adequate treatment in erary Essays (New York: Philosophical Library, this short essay, but one aspect of it is 1957), 79. This essay was originally published in French in 1939. 9 De Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” 51.

Dædalus Spring 2003 91 J. Hillis admirably encapsulated in a ½gure Jean- fathered. Lena exchanges Bunch for Miller on Paul Sartre uses in what is the best essay Burch–a replacement of just one letter, time on Faulknerian time. As Sartre rightly n for r, as if to suggest that for her one put it, for Faulkner “Man’s misfortune man is just about as good as any other. lies in his being time-bound.”10 Faulk- Lena represents an inexhaustible hu- ner’s “vision of the world,” he goes on to man vitality that can move forward say, through time as through space and that constantly renews itself by change. She can be compared to that of a man sitting travels by a kind of metaphorical or at in an open car and looking backward. At least tropological–since it is as much every moment, formless shadows, flicker- metonymic as metaphorical–displace- ings, faint tremblings and patches of light ment, while still remaining the same. rise up on either side of him, and only “My, my,” says Lena in the novel’s con- afterwards, when he has a little perspec- cluding lines. “A body does get around. tive, do they become trees and men and Here we ain’t been coming from Alaba- cars.11 ma but two months, and now it’s already Sartre’s spatial ½gure is an admirable Tennessee.” emblem of the time lag between the Lena’s story, treated with affectionate event and the awareness of the event and admiring irony by the narrator, sur- that de½nes Quentin Compson’s sense rounds the deathbound story of Joe of his doom, in his part of The Sound and Christmas. Christmas is caught in the the Fury. He can never quite catch up impossibility of being either black or with his present. white. He is unable to break out of the sterile circular repetition of the impasse Light in August balances two antithetical he is in, which keeps bringing him back ways to be related to time. The novel to the same place: opens with Lena Grove thinking to her- he is entering it again, the street which ran self, “I have come from Alabama: a fur for thirty years. It had been a paved street, piece. All the way from Alabama a-walk- where going should be fast. It had made a ing. A fur piece.”12 She is traveling in circle and he is still inside of it. Though search of Lucas Burch (or Brown), who during the last seven days he has had no has made her pregnant and then run paved street, yet he has traveled further away. The novel ends with Lena still than in all the thirty years before. And yet traveling, but now having made it he is still inside the circle. “And yet I have through Mississippi all the way up to been further in these seven days [while he Tennessee. She gives birth along the is fleeing after killing Joanna Burden] than way, and replaces, along the way, Lucas in all the thirty years,” he thinks. “But I Burch (alias Joe Brown) with Byron have never got outside that circle. I have Bunch. The latter will now accept the never broken out of the ring of what I responsibilities of being husband to have already done and cannot ever Lena and father to the child he has not undo.”13 10 Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury,” 79. Clearly it is better to be Lena Grove than Joe Christmas, but the novel shows 11 Ibid., 81–82. why it is not all that easy to choose to be 12 William Faulkner, Light in August (New one or the other. York: Vintage International, 1990), 3. 13 Ibid., 339.

92 Dædalus Spring 2003 Addie Bundren says in her only solilo- tively brief segments of internal mono- Time in quy in As I Lay Dying, “I could just re- logue ascribed to one or another of her literature member how my father used to say that family or neighbors, although the title the reason for living was to get ready to suggests that the whole novel takes place stay dead a long time.”14 Living is mov- within Addie’s consciousness, as she lies ing, in As I Lay Dying and Light in August, dying. ‘Internal monologue’ is not quite even though the movement is, as for all the right term for these strange pieces of of us, toward death as endpoint and un- language; they are rather fragments or derlying motivation. At the conceptual wedges of ½rst-person narration present- center of Addie’s soliloquy is a radical ed by one or another of the characters, disjunction between words and doing: and represent the perpetual present of consciousness to itself as it registers the . . . I would think how words go straight stream of its experience, what it sees and up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and hears and also what it thinks and feels. how terribly doing goes along the earth, Human temporality, this mode of nar- clinging to it, so that after a while the two ration suggests, consists of blocks of lan- lines are too far apart for the same person guage that register what is ‘out there’ to straddle from one to the other; and that from different temporal and spatial sin and love and fear are just sounds that points. These articulations always exist people who never sinned nor loved nor in the present, even when conscious- feared have for what they never had and ness/language is devoted to the act of cannot have until they forget the words.15 remembering, even, as is sometimes the Though Addie allows for a condition case in this novel, when they are enacted of “dark voicelessness in which the in the past rather than present tense and words are the deeds,” as opposed to “the out of chronological order. Flashbacks other words that are not deeds, that are and retracings of particular events from just the gaps in peoples’ lacks,”16 among different perspectives produce a jagged, the latter she includes the word ‘time’: cubist rendering that suggests that any “I knew that that word [‘love’] was like human event consists of the linguistic the others: just a shape to ½ll a lack . . . . perspectives on it. These perspectives time, Anse [her husband], love, what are in turn discontinuous, fragmented, you will, outside the circle.”17 If this is as the events move forward in time. It the case, to name time directly is to falsi- seems as if the reports of those events fy it. Time can only be spoken of indi- must exist in an atemporal database to rectly, in those performative ½gures for which only the invisible narrator has ac- time, words that are deeds, that Faulkner cess; and the events of the story as tirelessly invents. turned into language seem to hover As I Lay Dying, with the exception of somewhere in perpetual simultaneity, Addie’s one soliloquy, consists of rela- going on being repeated over and over, waiting to be partially recited in one or 14 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New another of the blocks of narrative. York: Vintage, 1964), 161. Taken all together, they add up ulti- 15 Ibid., 165–166. mately to a story, as the reader reads them, one by one. The reader moves for- 16 Ibid., 166. ward through the time of reading, skip- ping over the blank spaces between one 17 Ibid., 164. narrative block and the next. Each block

Dædalus Spring 2003 93 J. Hillis is labeled with the name of one or naked through my clothes. I said You dont Miller know what worry is. I dont know what it on another of the characters. These are time given in the running heads, oddly is. I dont know whether I am worrying or enough, in parentheses, as though the not. Whether I can or not. I dont know name were no more than a nominal tag whether I can cry or not. I dont know attached to a given block of language: whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a “(Darl),” “(Vardaman),” “(Anse),” wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.18 “(Addie).” These chunks of narration do In a strange anomalous kind of indi- not, however, add up to a shapely organ- rect discourse–strange because it is in ic whole. There are gaps and hiatuses the ½rst, not the third person–the ubiq- between them. Each moment of sus- uitous, anonymous, effaced, omniscient pended temporality exists as a potential- narrator has given to the characters his ly limitless multitude of linguistic per- (or its) power of language. This is a dis- spectives on it. tinctively Faulknerian, inimitable lingo It is wrong to think of these blocks of (one remembers that Faulkner is sup- narrative as registering in a completely posed to have written As I Lay Dying on a straightforward way the linguistic con- wheelbarrow used as a desk while he sciousness of this or that character, as was working for a coal½red power plant Joyce at least purports to be doing in in Mississippi). The whole novel is en- Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of closed within the grave, compassionate, Ulysses. The characters in As I Lay Dying perpetual present tense of the narrative have a prescient knowledge of events voice. This is a kind of collective con- they have not seen or heard with their sciousness/language, within which the own eyes and ears–as though they could individual voices of the characters are be where they are not. The absent Darl, embedded. This narrative voice, it could for example, narrates the episode in be argued, coincides, or at least overlaps, which Cash and Vernon ½nish Addie’s with the distinctive consciousness/lan- cof½n in the pouring rain. Though often guage of Addie Bundren, the protagonist the dialect of the characters is mimed, it who lies dying. is extremely unlikely that these country If the narrative voice, an anonymous folk would ½nd language for the lyric ‘it,’ encompasses the whole narration in Faulknerian representations of what an embrace like that of some god or god- consciousness is conscious of. dess who has taken the form of a ubiqui- One example, of so many, is what goes tous cloud, it is just as true to say that on in Dewey Dell’s mind when she goes the whole novel is enclosed within Ad- down to the barn to milk the cow just die Bundren’s mind. As I Lay Dying is sur- after her mother has died. Dewey is rounded as a strange kind of proleptic pregnant by Lafe, a town boy. She is anticipation by the consciousness of the more than a little worried about that, ‘I’ of the title, that is, of Addie, as she lies worried beyond worrying. The word dying. In the opening narrative segments ‘dead’ echoes through her musing: she is still alive, listening to her son Cash The sky lies flat down the slope, upon the as he saws and nails her cof½n, but by secret clumps. The dead air shapes the the sixth segment, spoken by the neigh- dead earth in the dead darkness, further bor Cora, she is dead. Cora’s soliloquy is away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It in the past tense, spoken at some inde- lies dead and warm upon me, touching me 18 Ibid., 61.

94 Dædalus Spring 2003 terminate time after Addie’s death. If tion–a motion so slow as to seem move- Time in Addie’s consciousness as she lies dying ment in place–of the Bundren wagon literature is thought of, on the strength of the title, toward a goal called, opaquely, “it”– as encompassing the whole novel–in- presumably the grave in which Addie cluding all the events that happen after will be buried. Here movement through she is dead and laid in the cof½n her son space seems to be a crossing through has fashioned with hand tools–then the time that is everywhere at once: “We go novel would, with a vengeance, express a on, with a motion so sopori½c, so dream- moment of Heideggerean ‘ecstasy’–a like as to be uninferant of progress, as moving forward into the future, a move- though time and not space were decreas- ment even beyond the moment of one’s ing between us and it.”20 death, to come back to the past. That Dewey Dell’s lovemaking with Rafe past is articulated in Addie’s sole sec- happens in the woods beyond the rows tion, inserted long after her death has where they have been picking cotton. If been narrated. The dead-alive Addie her cotton bag is full by the end of the soliloquizes about her past life with her row, she thinks, she will join him in the husband and the in½delity to him with a woods; he ½lls her bag for her, and she local preacher that produced her son succumbs: “I said if it dont mean for me Jewel. to do it the sack will not be full and I will turn up the next row but if the sack is If the relation of a human body’s move- full, I cannot help it . . . . And so it was full ment through space–that is, the move- when we came to the end of the row and ment of Addie’s corpse toward its bur- I could not help it.”21 ial–provides the large-scale temporal This is one of the many places where framework for As I Lay Dying, certain lin- Faulkner dramatizes his sense that hu- guistic moments encapsulate Faulkner- man time, as he understands it, elimi- ian lived temporality more exactly, in a nates human freedom and any moment single emblematic representation. of decision. For Dewey Dell ‘not yet’ has The novel opens with an odd narra- proleptically turned into an ‘always al- tion, by Darl, of the way he and his half- ready,’ as if every deed is done before it brother Jewel walk in single ½le across a is done–a view of time that eliminates cotton ½eld, with Jewel at ½rst behind by the very possibility of an irruptive, un- ½fteen feet and then ahead by ½fteen feet predictable and inaugural event. after Darl follows the path around the The most explicit identi½cation of spa- cottonhouse in the middle of the ½eld, tial movement with time in As I Lay while Jewel steps through the cotton- Dying comes when the family is trying to house, in one window and out another.19 pull, futilely, with rope, the wagon con- Spatial movement here allegorizes tem- taining the cof½n that holds Addie’s fast- poral progress. The scene suggests that rotting corpse across the flooded river. time develops according to different Part of the family (Darl, Cash, and Jew- rhythms for different people. It would el) is on this side of the river with the follow that temporal progress is relative, wagon, the cof½n, the corpse, the mules, not synchronized. Cash’s tools, and Jewel’s horse. Part is Another passage, quite characteristic on the other side (“Vernon and pa and of Faulkner, describes the dreamlike mo- 20 Ibid., 101. 19 Ibid., 3–4. 21 Ibid., 26.

Dædalus Spring 2003 95 J. Hillis Vardaman and Dewey Dell”).22 The would be nice if you could just ravel out Miller 24 on looping rope across the river, the “ter- into time.” time ri½c” flowing of the flooded river itself, For Faulkner, one does not ravel out of express the sagging of time. This is per- sequential time into eternity. One ravels haps a reference to the bending of time out, or wishes to ravel out, into time. To in Einsteinian relativistic physics, bor- ravel out into time would be to escape rowed by Faulkner to express in a spatial the false time in which one thing seems ½gure the disjunction or timelag be- to happen after another, in a line, by dis- tween one person’s experience of time solving or fraying out into the all-at- and another’s. By Darl’s account: onceness or always-already that is time for Faulkner. The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Dewey o conclude, I would like briefly to in- Dell are the only things in sight not of that T dicate how W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the single monotony of desolation leaning Swan” expresses a quite different con- with that terri½c quality a little from right ception of human time from Faulkner’s. to left, as though we had reached the place For Yeats, time is neither a simultaneity where the motion of the wasted world ac- (as it is for Faulkner) nor a seamless con- celerates just before the ½nal precipice. Yet tinuum between past, present, and fu- they appear dwarfed. It is as though the ture. It is, rather, a flow punctuated space between us were time: an irrevoca- rhythmically by violent instantaneous ble quality. It is as though time, no longer interruptions, as well as by innumerable running straight before us in a diminish- smaller events, such as those his poems ing line, now runs parallel between us like often register. These larger irruptions a looping string, the distance being the come in two-thousand-year intervals as doubling accretion of the thread and not ‘annunciations’ from on high, and are the interval between.23 radically inaugural. They precipitate the This passage explicitly thematizes the series of historical events that fatefully way human temporality is experienced flow from them, just as the smaller as some form of spatial movement–how events are in one way or another deter- space transforms into time. minative for individual lives. Time, for Faulkner, exists not as a con- Zeus’s rape of Leda is signaled by tinuity between future, present, and Yeats’s use of the word ‘sudden,’ as im- past, but as a simultaneity, an all-at-once portant and recurrent a word for Yeats as viewed from multiple perspectives. To the word ‘terri½c’ is for Faulkner. “Leda die, for Faulkner, is to enter time as the and the Swan” begins: “A sudden blow: co-presence of everything happening at the great wings beating still/Above the once. Darl, closest perhaps to Faulkner staggering girl . . . .” Then: “A shudder in of all the characters in As I Lay Dying the loins engenders there/The broken (though, ironically, he ends up in an in- wall, the burning roof and tower/And sane asylum), best expresses this distinc- Agamemnon dead” 25–this event, since tively Faulknerian temporality in one of it engenders Helen and Clytemnestra, his soliloquies: “If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It 24 Ibid., 198.

22 Ibid., 137. 25 William Butler Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. 23 Ibid., 139. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 441.

96 Dædalus Spring 2003 ‘causes’ the Trojan War and Clytemnes- Kant’s Third Critique. “The editor of a Time in tra’s murder of her husband, two central political review [George Russell, editor literature stories in Greek historical mythology. of The Irish Statesman],” says Yeats, However, as the note of explanation “asked me for a poem . . . but as I wrote, Yeats wrote to accompany the ½rst publi- bird and lady took such possession of cation of the poem (in The Dial, June the scene that all politics went out of 1924) indicates, the poem grew out of it.”27 The poem, like all felicitous speech concern not for the distant past but for acts, brings about the thing it talks the political present. The Enlighten- about. It is an ironic, punctual allegory, ment, initiated by Hobbes, Yeats says, in the prolonged instant of the poem, of has left “a soil so exhausted that it can- the contemporary politics that have van- not grow that crop again for centuries. . . . ished from any explicit mention in the Nothing is now possible but some move- poem. ment from above preceded by some vio- It would take a longer argument to lent annunciation.”26 make my claims about the distinctive That new annunciation, I claim, is the temporality of Yeats’s “Leda and the poem itself. The poem is a performative Swan” fully intelligible and persuasive. linguistic event that exceeds its circum- But I hear the bartender in Eliot’s “The stances. In this, it is, in its own small Waste Land” calling out “HURRY UP way, an irruptive, unpredictable, and in- PLEASE IT’S TIME.” augural event, just like the Declaration So a fuller discussion of time in litera- of Independence or the publication of ture must await a timelier occasion. 26 Ibid., 828. 27 Ibid.

Dædalus Spring 2003 97 Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson & Marco Verweij

Is time running out? The case of global warming

Most climatologists agree that by gases, over the course of the new century burning fossil fuels and engaging in oth- the average temperature on earth will er forms of consumption and production rise and local climates will change, with we are increasing the amount of green- possibly catastrophic consequences. house gases that float around in the at- Will this indeed happen? If so, should mosphere. These gases, in trapping some we do something about it? And if yes, of the sun’s heat, warm the earth and when? Does global warming put the fu- enable life. The trouble is, some predict, ture of the world at risk? Is time running that if we continue to accumulate those out? Or should we take our time in or- der to investigate and evaluate soberly the possible risks of greenhouse gases? Mary Douglas, a Foreign Honorary Member of In our view, how an individual answers the American Academy since 1974, is professor these questions and understands a phe- emeritus of anthropology at University College nomenon like global warming will large- London and the author of numerous works on ly depend on what kind of social setting human culture, including “Purity and Danger” he or she is a component of. Different (1966) and “Thought Styles” (1996). social settings produce in their adher- ents different perceptions of reality, in- Michael Thompson, a leading proponent of cul- cluding the perception of time. tural theory, is director of the Musgrave Institute in London and a professor and senior research fel- low at the University of Bergen in Norway. He In order to understand current conflicts has co-authored several volumes, including “Cul- over the prospect of global warming, we ture Matters” (1997) and “Divided We Stand: ½nd it helpful to sort out these ‘social Rede½ning Politics, Technology and Social settings’ in terms of the different forms Choice” (1990). of social solidarity. Each of these forms, in our view, produces characteristically Marco Verweij is a senior research fellow at the different modes of anticipating the Max Planck Project Group on Common Goods in future. Bonn, Germany. He is the author of “Trans- The current landscape of the social sci- boundary Environmental Problems and Cultural ences can for our present purposes be di- Theory: The Protection of the Rhine and Great vided roughly into two camps. One Lakes” (2000). camp is built on the assumption that hu- man beings are fundamentally the same.

98 Dædalus Spring 2003 Rational choice theory–or the econom- ever manage to communicate across cul- Is time running ic approach to social analysis–is a major tures, understand history, cooperate, out? contender from this camp. Via its ‘ho- and interpret new events?2 mogeneity assumption,’ this approach Fortunately, we don’t have to choose posits that all individuals are similarly between these two extreme positions. It rational, or self-interested. The second is possible–at least in principle–to dis- camp harbors a contrary position: the tinguish simultaneously between a lim- only goal to which social scientists can ited number of social and cultural forms, truly aspire is to document how every and still recognize wide social and cul- person, community, and epoch is incom- tural variety. Present-day physics main- parably different from other people, tains that all the material objects that we communities, and epochs. Post-struc- can observe on earth and beyond consist turalism, for instance, explicitly rejects of endlessly varying combinations of making generalizations about social life only six basic particles. Analogously, it on the grounds that such an exercise might be possible to discern a limited would always do injustice to the unique- number of fundamental forms of social ness of people and cultures. But also organization from which a large variety many of those who have not embraced of ultimate forms of social and cultural post-structuralist tenets have ended up life can be derived. This is the starting arguing that social scientists can only point of what we have come to call cul- uncover causal relationships that are tural theory.3 entirely local and temporary.1 The original aim of this theory was to We feel that both of these edi½ces sit devise a typology of social forms that on shaky foundations. In view of the cul- ½t–to the extent possible–the classi½- tural and social variety across time and catory schemes developed by the grand space, it seems odd to insist that all indi- old social theorists (Durkheim, Tönnies, viduals merely follow a single rationali- Maine, Weber, etc.), as well as the evi- ty. It is not possible to explain social dif- dence collected in subsequent ethno- ferences–for instance, why war or pov- graphic studies.4 erty reigns here and now but not there According to our cultural theory, there and then–on the basis of human univer- are four primary ways of organizing, sals. If everybody were similarly rational 2 Aaron B. Wildavsky, “Choosing Preferences or self-interested, then this factor could by Constructing Institutions,” American Political not explain any differences between Science Review 81 (1987): 3–21. cases; ironically, by assuming that every- one is similarly rational or self-interest- 3 Mary Douglas, ed., Essays in the Sociology of ed, rationality and self-interest are auto- Perception (London: Routledge, 1982); Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (London: Rout- matically ruled out as explanatory fac- ledge, 1987); Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, tors in any comparative analysis. Yet if it and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, were true that individuals were wholly Col.: Westview Press, 1990). This approach has different from each other, how could we also sailed under the flags of ‘theory of socio- cultural viability,’ ‘grid-group analysis,’ and 1 For example, Donald P. Green and Ian ‘theory of plural rationality.’ Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New 4 Mary Douglas, “Cultural Bias,” in Occasional Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), Paper No. 35 (London: Royal Anthropological 188; Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Mat- Institute, 1978); Alan Page Fiske, Structures of ter, trans. Steven Sampson (Cambridge: Cam- Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human bridge University Press, 2001), 167. Relations (New York: The Free Press, 1991).

Dædalus Spring 2003 99 Mary perceiving, and justifying social relations social unit constrains the thought and Douglas, (usually called ‘ways of life,’ or ‘social action of individuals. Michael Thompson solidarities’): High-group strength results when peo- & Marco • fatalism ple devote a lot of their available time to Verweij • egalitarianism interacting with other members of their on unit. In general, the more things they do time • hierarchy • individualism. together, and the longer they spend doing them, the higher the group We postulate that these four ways of life strength. Where admission to the social are at issue in every conceivable domain unit is hard to obtain, making the unit of social life. Most such domains (say more exclusive and conscious of its the way in which a school operates, or boundary, the group strength also tends the way in which an international re- to be high. An extreme case of high- gime functions) will consist of some group strength is the monastic commu- mixture of these pure forms. As many nity whose members renounce their pri- social domains can be distinguished vate property upon entering and depend within and between societies (and as on the corporate body for all their mate- many societies can be distinguished rial and social needs. High-group around the world), the theory allows one strength of this sort requires a long-term to perceive a wide and ever-changing commitment and a tight identi½cation cultural and social variety–while still of members with one another as a cor- enabling one to formulate general prop- porate identity. Individuals are expected ositions about social and political life. to act on behalf of the collective whole, These propositions include possible and the corporate body is expected to act ways in which people perceive and struc- in the normative interests of its mem- ture their time. In order to explain and bers. illustrate this, we will have to set out our Group strength is low when people cultural theory in some detail. negotiate their way through life on their own behalf as individuals, neither con- Each of the four ways of life consists of strained by, nor reliant upon, a single a speci½c way of structuring social rela- group of others. Instead, low-group peo- tions and a supporting cast of particular ple interact as individuals with other beliefs, values, emotions, perceptions, individuals, picking and choosing with and interests. Our fourfold typology is whom they will associate, as their pres- strictly derived from two dimensions: ent preoccupations and perceived inter- 5 what we will call ‘grid’ and ‘group.’ ests demand. The low-group experience Grid measures the extent to which role is a competitive, entrepreneurial way of differentiation constrains the behavior life where the individual is not strongly of individuals: where roles are primarily constrained by duty to other persons. ascribed, grid constraints are high; Attractive though this freedom from where roles are primarily a matter of constraint might ½rst appear to some, choice, grid constraints are low. Group, there is a serious disadvantage: in a low- by contrast, measures the extent to group context, you cannot count on the which an overriding commitment to a support of your fellows should your per- 5 Jonathan L. Gross and Steve Rayner, Measur- sonal fortune wane. In the high-group ing Culture: A Paradigm for the Analysis of Social context, the safety net of social support Organization (New York: Columbia University compensates for the loss of personal au- Press, 1985). tonomy. 100 Dædalus Spring 2003 Grid stands for the complementary Figure 1 Is time running bundle of constraints on social interac- Four Forms of Social Solidarity out? tion. Grid is high whenever roles are dis- tributed on the basis of explicit public social classi½cations, such as gender, high grid color, position in a hierarchy, holding a bureaucratic of½ce, descent in a senior clan or lineage, or point of progression fatalism hierarchy through an age-grade system. It is low when classi½catory distinctions only weakly limit the range of social choices low group high group and activities open to people. A low-grid social environment is one in which individualism egalitarianism access to roles depends on personal abil- ities to compete or negotiate for them, or even on formal regulations that ensure equal access and opportunity to com- low grid pete. In either case, access to roles is not dependent on any ascribed characteris- tics of rank or birth. Group measures the extent to which an over- Assigning two values (high and low) to riding commitment to a social unit constrains the thought and action of individuals. Grid the grid and group dimensions gives the stands for the complementary bundle of con- four ways of life: the four social solidari- straints on social interaction. ties. The combination of a high score on the grid dimension (many rules pre- atomistic. Trial and error, in self- scribing people’s roles) with a high score organizing ego-focused networks (mar- on the group dimension (strong group kets), is the way to go, with Adam boundaries) gives the hierarchical way. A Smith’s invisible hand ensuring that high-grid score with a low-group score people only do well when others also characterizes fatalism. The third way of bene½t. The upholders of individualist organizing and justifying social rela- solidarity, in consequence, trust others tions, individualism, is associated with until they give them reason not to and low scores on both the grid and group then retaliate in kind (the winning ‘tit scales. Last, egalitarianism is associated for tat’ strategy in the iterated prisoner’s with a low-grid score and a high-group dilemma game), and see it as only fair score (see ½gure 1). that (as in the joint stock company) those who put the most in get the most We are now in a position to describe out. They think institutions that work how these four different forms of associ- with the grain of the market (that get rid ation tend to produce different ways of of environmentally harmful subsidies, perceiving the natural world and also for instance) are what are needed. different approaches to a phenomenon In an egalitarian social setting, actors like global warming. see nature as fragile, intricately intercon- In an individualist social setting, ac- nected and ephemeral, and man as es- tors view nature as benign and resilient sentially caring (until corrupted by coer- –able to recover from any exploitation cive institutions such as markets and hi- –and man as inherently self-seeking and erarchies). We must all tread lightly on

Dædalus Spring 2003 101 Mary the earth, and it is not enough that peo- approach contemporary public policy Douglas, ple start off equal; they must end up issues. As Barry Schwartz has acutely Michael Thompson equal as well–equality of result. Trust remarked: and leveling go hand-in-hand, and insti- & Marco Each way of life undermines itself. Indi- Verweij tutions that distribute unequally are dis- vidualism would mean chaos without on trusted. Voluntary simplicity is the only time hierarchical authority to enforce contracts solution to our environmental problems, and repel enemies. To get work done and with the Precautionary Principle being settle disputes the egalitarian order needs strictly enforced on those who are hierarchy, too. Hierarchies, in turn, would tempted not to share the simple life. be stagnant without the creative energy of In a hierarchical social setting, actors individualism, uncohesive without the see the world as controllable. Nature is binding force of equality, unstable with- stable until pushed beyond discoverable out the passivity and acquiescence of limits, and man is malleable: deeply fatalism. Dominant and subordinate ways flawed but redeemable by ½rm, long- of life thus exist in alliance yet this rela- lasting, and trustworthy institutions. tionship is fragile, constantly shifting, Fair distribution is by rank and station constantly generating a societal environ- or, in the modern context, by need (with ment conducive to change.6 the level of need being determined by expert and dispassionate authority). En- In the context of complex modern so- vironmental management requires cer- cieties characterized by competing ways ti½ed experts to determine the precise of life, cultural theory thus has several locations of nature’s limits, and statuto- normative implications.7 First, there is ry regulation to ensure that all economic the realization that people are arguing activity is kept within those limits. from different premises and that, since In a fatalistic social setting, ½nally, these premises are anchored in different actors ½nd neither rhyme nor reason in forms of solidarity, they will never agree. nature, and suppose that man is ½ckle Second, in line with the ‘argumentative and untrustworthy. Fairness is not to be turn’ in policy analysis, this contention, found in this life, and there is no possi- as well as being unavoidable, is all to the bility of effecting change for the better. good: something to be harnessed ‘Defect ½rst’–the winning strategy in through constructive communication. the one-off prisoner’s dilemma–makes Third, though each solidarity has its sense here, given the unreliability of own distinctive model of democracy,8 communication and the permanent no one of them has the ‘right’ model; absence of prior acts of good faith. the essence of democracy, rather, is in its Without the possibility of ever getting in contestation. sync with nature, or of building trust 6 Barry Schwartz, “A Pluralistic Model of Cul- with others, the fatalistic world unlike ture,” Contemporary Sociology 20 (1991): 765. the three others is one in which learning is impossible. “Why bother?” therefore 7 Steven Ney and Michael Thompson, “Con- is the rational management response. sulting the Frogs: The Normative Implications of Cultural Theory” in Cultural Theory as Politi- Since it was formulated, this classi½ca- cal Science, ed. Michael Thompson, Gunnar tion of the four different ways of life has Grendstad, and Per Selle (London: Routledge, helped illuminate the paradoxical and 1999). sometimes contradictory ways in which individuals in different social settings 8 Hierarchy calls for a guardian model of de- mocracy; egalitarianism instills a preference

102 Dædalus Spring 2003 ince nature is perceived differently latter as merely the continuation of the Is time S running within these different ways of life, we former. Development in the here-and- out? should not be surprised to ½nd that time, now, they reason, may not be sustain- too, is perceived variously within these able a decade or two down the road. settings. Indeed, this variation in the so- Their aim, therefore, is to provide a cial constructions of time–simply in clear description of long-term sustain- terms of how the long- and short-terms ability and then to intervene in the are distinguished from and related to short-term activities of the market one another–is among the longest es- actors to ensure that we all arrive safe- tablished of the seventy or so sets of pre- ly at that desirable future: ‘wise guid- dictions from cultural theory. Long ance,’ as modelers call it. before climate change became a hotly • Egalitarian actors will tend to be as dis- debated political issue, these predictions trustful of hierarchies as they are of were set out in Douglas (1978), Rayner unfettered markets. The short-term, (1982), and Thompson (1984)9: for egalitarians, is severely truncated, • Individualistic actors will tend to see and the long-term–disastrous if we do the long-term as the continuation of not learn the error of our inequitable the short-term. Myopically, they insist ways; wonderful if we do–is almost that doing well in the here-and-now is upon us. Radical change now–not the best guarantee for doing well later business-as-usual and not wise guid- on. ‘Business as usual’ is how complex ance–is what is needed if we are to systems-modelers characterize this in- have a future at all. dividualistic line of action. • Those fatalistic actors who ½nd them- • Hierarchical actors–regulators, plan- selves marginal to all three active soli- ners, public-health inspectors, and the darities–individualistic ego-focused like–will tend to be unhappy about all networks, bounded and hierarchically this short-termism (as they call it). ranked organizations, and bounded While individualists like Henry Ford but unranked groups–will see no consider history bunk, hierarchical point in sorting out long-terms and actors are at pains to anchor their col- short-terms this way or that. “If your lectivity in it. Hierarchical actors, number’s on it,” they assure one therefore, can see both the short-term another, “that’s it.” Why put yourself and the long-term, and do not see the to a whole lot of bother over some- thing you can do nothing about? for a participatory model of democracy; indi- These four ways of being time-bound– vidualism extols a protective model of democra- distinguishable in terms of how the cy, which should enable individuals to carry out their own plans; and fatalism breeds a belief long- and short-terms in each corre- that democracy may be a good thing, but will spond to one another–are mutually in- not be established in this life. compatible. “It would be a dull world,” barroom philosophers are fond of de- 9 Douglas, “Cultural Bias”; Steve Rayner, “The claring, “if everyone were the same”– Perception of Time and Space in Egalitarian Sects: A Millenarian Cosmology,” in Essays in and we agree with them. We would also the Sociology of Perception, ed. Mary Douglas add that, since this fourfold contestation (London: Routledge, 1982); Michael Thompson, is essential, that dull world is unattain- “Among the Energy Tribes: A Cultural Frame- able. But that, of course, does not stop work for the Analysis and Design of Energy Pol- people from trying to ignore crucial dif- icy,” Policy Sciences 17 (1984): 321–339.

Dædalus Spring 2003 103 Mary ferences, as the case of climate change We–this generation of humans–are at Douglas, demonstrates. our most important juncture since we Michael Thompson came out of the trees six million years ago. & Marco We can now return to the issue of It is our decision, ours today, whether Verweij global warming. Will this indeed hap- Earth continues to be a marvelously liv- on pen? If so, should we do something ing, diverse oasis in the blackness of time about it? And if yes, what and when? space, or whether the charismatic mega- Adherents of the different solidarities fauna of the future will consist of Norway will tend to answer these questions dif- rats and cockroaches. 11 ferently. Here (as in Steve Rayner’s classic 1982 Those who bind themselves into egali- study of the Workers’ Institute of tarian settings–often radical environ- Marxism-Leninism Mao Xedong mental groups such as Earth First!–are Thought, in London’s Brixton) past, convinced that corporate greed and present, and future are compressed in a power lust are already unleashing cata- way that is typical of the egalitarian form strophic climate change, and that we of solidarity. All of the past–in this case, must drastically alter our behavior now, six million years of it–has been but a before it is too late. Compromise, for buildup to our present situation; never these ‘deep ecologists,’ is therefore out before have our actions so threatened of the question: the viability of the planet on which we To avoid co-option, we feel it is necessary depend. Our current choices, moreover, to avoid the corporate organizational are decisive for all time to come. Make structure so readily embraced by many the right decision today–at this “our environmental groups. Earth First! is a most important juncture”–and eternal movement, not an organization. Our bliss–“a marvelously living, diverse structure is non-hierarchical. We have no oasis in the blackness of space”–will be highly-paid “professional staff” or formal our reward. Fail to make that decision leadership.10 and there will be no eternity, save for the “Norway rats and cockroaches.” The conviction that the problem is se- Those who belong to organizations of rious, imminent, and–if not dealt with a more individualistic bent–the United quickly–irreversible, supports this egal- States’s Cato Institute, for instance, and itarian mode of organization: Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs– .. . our activities are now beginning to have see it all very differently. They are skepti- fundamental, systemic effects upon the cal of the diagnosis itself and they are entire life-support system of the planet– convinced that, even if it is correct, the upsetting the world’s climate, poisoning consequences will be neither catastroph- the oceans, destroying the ozone layer ic nor uniformly negative. Far from which protects us from excessive ultravio- being at a six-million-year juncture, we co let radiation, changing the 2 ratio in the are, they assert, where we have always atmosphere, and spreading acid rain, ra- been: faced with uncertainties and chal- dioactive fallout, pesticides and industrial lenges that, if tackled boldly by a diversi- contamination throughout the biosphere. ty of competing agents, can be trans- formed into opportunities from which 10 All Earth First! quotes are from (26 July 2002). 11 Ibid.

104 Dædalus Spring 2003 all can bene½t. The long-term holds no On top of all that, individualistic or- Is time running fears for them, because this optimistic ganizations, thanks to their myopic con- out? short-term bubble, as it moves along, struction of time, are open to the view will take care of it all. For that to happen that technological progress and the un- and go on happening, of course, there predictable forces of ‘creative destruc- must be no junctures; at the very least, tion’ may soon render today’s fuss over they must be far enough out into the fu- climate change irrelevant. The produc- ture for us to not need to worry about tion costs of renewable energy, they them. point out, have fallen dramatically over Given this social construction of time, the last few decades, and these new tech- individualistically organized out½ts pre- nologies–wind, hydro, geothermal, and fer a two-pronged approach: the dis- solar–are rapidly becoming (indeed, in mantling of junctures within the short- some instances, have already become) term bubble, and adaptation to any that competitive with the old technologies of may exist beyond that bubble. They fossil fuels. Their prescriptions, in con- therefore focus on the lacunae in current sequence, dramatically differ from those climate-change science: of the deep ecologists. As Roger Bate, di- • Clouds, whose formation is poorly under- rector of the Environment Unit of the stood but which are expected to be more Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes: prevalent in a warmer world, would likely On the whole, society’s problems and reflect more sunlight back into space challenges are best dealt with by people before it reached the earth’s surface. and companies interacting with each oth- • Human sources of greenhouse gases are er freely without interference from politi- dwarfed by natural sources (volcanoes, for cians and the state. instance, and termites and other wood- We do not know whether the world is digesting creatures)–which means that it de½nitively warming, given recent satellite is impossible in the short-run to say data. If the world is warming, we do not whether any warming (if it is happening) know what is causing the change–man or is man-made. nature. We do not know whether a warm- • The climate models that are being used to er world would be a good thing or a bad predict future changes cannot even accu- thing. rately chart changes that have already [The scienti½c evidence] does not sug- occurred. gest that immediate action for signi½cant limitation on energy consumption is ur- Looking beyond the short-term bubble, gently required . . . . Until the science of cli- they point out that a carbon-richer cli- mate change is better understood, no gov- mate would increase agricultural pro- ernment action should be undertaken be- ductivity, and that, even if the negative yond the elimination of subsidies and oth- impacts did outweigh the positive ones, er distortions of the market.12 we would still need to compare the costs of preventing global warming now to the This business-as-usual strategy is costs of adapting to higher temperatures anathema to the members of the numer- a few decades hence. Money not spent on preventing climate change, they 12 Roger Bate, “The Political Economy of Cli- mate Change Science,” in Environmental Unit point out, could be used to tackle other, Briefing Paper No. 1 (London: Institute of Eco- more pressing environmental and social nomic Affairs, 2001), available at (27 July 2002).

Dædalus Spring 2003 105 Mary ous hierarchical organizations that have Implicit in their shared commitment is Douglas, dominated the global warming debate. the belief that we can, and should, steer Michael Thompson They are appalled by its short-termism ourselves, in a planned and orderly way, & Marco and its accompanying assumption that to a rather precisely de½ned and timed Verweij the myriad and uncoordinated actions of future. The computer models built by on ½rms and consumers will inevitably be the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate time bene½cial for the totality. Worse still Change (and by other proponents of when this assumption is made across ‘wise guidance’/‘global stewardship’) time as well as space–because, hierar- have been churning out scenarios that chical actors insist, the long-term is nev- supposedly show a variety of future er simply the continuation of the short- global emissions of greenhouse gases, term. And they are also dismissive of the along with their worldwide ecological egalitarian claim that, if only we make and economic impacts, and the costs of the right (and radical) choice today– attaining these future states. Their busi- at this “our most important juncture”– ness-as-usual scenarios, however, typi- all will be ½ne for evermore. cally account for little rapid technologi- In the hierarchical view, each single cal change (and certainly for no out-of- contribution that households, compa- the-blue, Schumpeterian gales of cre- nies, and even whole countries make to ative destruction). Other projections the buildup of greenhouse gases is so that are free of imminent discontinu- small as to be insigni½cant to these un- ities–ocean currents changing direc- discerning actors. Moreover, the conse- tion, for instance, or ice caps collapsing quences lie far into the future and spread catastrophically–reveal that the radical across the entire globe: way beyond and immediate action advocated by the their temporal and spatial kens. It there- deep ecologists would be extremely cost- fore makes no sense for any household ly and disruptive. or ½rm or country to unilaterally reduce The scenarios, as a result, reproduce its emissions. What we are faced with, the models’ hierarchical temporal as- therefore, is a ‘tragedy of the global sumptions as their conclusions13: only a commons’–and the only conceivable gradual and orderly phasing out of remedy is for all the governments and greenhouse gas emissions, undertaken parliaments of the world to formally by governments and spread out over the agree on the extent to which future next ½fty or so years, will see us through. emissions should be cut, which coun- And, as the language in which these con- tries should do so, how, and when. States clusions are couched makes clear, these should then impose these intergovern- things should be left to the experts: mental agreements on the multitude of Studies show that the costs of stabilizing consumers and producers within their carbon dioxide concentrations in the at- borders. mosphere [carbon dioxide being the main This is the logic behind the 1997 Kyoto greenhouse gas] increase as the concentra- Protocol to the un Framework Conven- tion stabilization level declines. While tion on Climate Change. It is espoused there is a moderate increase in the costs by almost all the governments of the when passing from a 750 to a 550 ppm con- world, by un agencies and the World centration stabilization level, there is a Bank, as well as by the large mainstream environmental organizations (the ones 13 Michael Thompson, “Among the Energy of which Earth First! is so disparaging). Tribes.”

106 Dædalus Spring 2003 larger increase in costs passing from a 550 warming will never be resolved simply Is time to a 440 ppm unless the emissions in the running by making a rational choice on strictly out? baseline scenario are very low.14 scienti½c grounds. It is a battle, as well, between groups of actors with different In other words, global climate change perceptions of time that derive from policy should go neither too fast (as the conflicting ways of organizing and justi- deep ecologists would have it) nor too fying social relations. slow (as the individualistic actors would Unlike the rational choice theorists, have it). Instead, only those bureaucratic we do not assume that one group’s pre- organizations that are both long-lived dictions are inherently more rational or and farsighted can determine what that accurate than another’s. Unlike the post- pace should be, and then get all the structuralists, we do not shy away from world’s nations to march in step to it. concluding with a normative generaliza- tion: If this sort of institutional turmoil oes global warming put the future of D intensi½es as we approach various envi- the world at risk? Is time running out? ronmental limits, then one policy chal- Or should we take our time in order to lenge will be to maintain and nurture a investigate and evaluate soberly the pos- dynamic plurality of contending points sible risks presented by greenhouse of view. Wisdom will lie in remaining gases? open to, and appropriately critical of, We don’t have the answer to these each one.15 questions. But our cultural theory teach- es us that vigorous debate among rival perspectives is the best way to address 15 Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, “Zen and the Art of Climate Maintenance,” Nature them. That is because the issue of global 390 (1997): 332–334; Marco Verweij, “Curbing Global Warming the Easy Way: An Alternative 14 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate to the Kyoto Protocol,” Government & Opposi- Change, Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report tion 38 (2003). (2001), 28.

Dædalus Spring 2003 107 Richard Fenn

Apocalypse & the end of time

Religious traditions seek to turn the eliminated in cosmic battle, or con- mere sequence of moments and events signed to eternal punishment in the next into a signi½cant past, present, and fu- life, or relegated to the eternally recur- ture. Christianity, like Judaism and Is- ring wheel of moments and events. lam, has created a sacred history–an Biblical prophets speak of a day that account that binds together the mo- comes like a thief in the night, or with ments of life into a continuous narrative the blast of a trumpet, suddenly and with a beginning, middle, and end–of with fateful consequences for all except which those who are included in the au- the superbly well prepared. Such visions thorized version of such a myth may see of the end conjure up some of the disad- their own time on earth as a part. If indi- vantages that inhere in the passage of viduals live according to the prevailing time: the surprise of the unprecedented, myth, they may pass the test of time– the bewilderment that accompanies the and enjoy life eternal. discovery of the unique. But they also On the other hand, those who fail the promise a partial immunity to the pas- test must suffer the passage of time–a sage of time: There will be a new Jerusa- world that is forever disappearing. Only lem to replace the old. those who live in accordance with the transcendent pattern revealed by the There is a price to be paid, however, for larger story, who conform to its plan and the apocalyptic triumph over time. The welcome the end, are ½t to be relieved of self must be subdued, the soul ½tted into time and its burdens. All others will be an authorized version of the sacred sto- ry. In some versions of Christian apoca- lypse, the individual is absorbed on the Richard Fenn, an ordained priest in the Episcopal ½nal day into a collectivity engaged in Church, is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of continual adoration of the only One who Christianity and Society at Princeton Theological has any remaining claim to uniqueness, Seminary and editor of “Religion and Theology authority, and ½nality. That One alone in Interdisciplinary Perspective.” The author of has a claim to being unprecedented, hav- “The Return of the Primitive” (2001) and “The ing been from the beginning: the only End of Time” (1997), he is currently working to One whose Word is ½nal and whose acts develop the descent into hell into a spiritual disci- are irreversible. There is no higher sov- pline. ereignty.

108 Dædalus Spring 2003 Indeed, some Christian apocalyptic the individual the most radical forms of Apocalypse & the end scenarios view the end as a time in self-loss. Thus Sikh and Islamic terror- of time which there will be no surviving rivals to ists immolate themselves in suicide at- one’s own faith: no non-Christians, no tacks while imagining themselves as in½dels. Pat Robertson foresees a cosmic about to be transported into a world be- battle pitting “the people of the Babylo- yond time, as the unfaithful are left to nian humanistic and occultic traditions” behold their own time running out. against “the people of the Abrahamic, It is no wonder that Muslims should monotheistic tradition.”1 When the bat- hate the Christian West, exempli½ed in tle is over, the only people left standing the power of the United States. No cul- will be those whose thoughts, words, ture appreciates having its own claims to and deeds conform to what Robertson uniqueness and superiority challenged has in mind when he speaks of the by a rival culture that makes similar ‘Abrahamic’ tradition. But even those claims. Thus Rome and Jerusalem hated Jews who do survive Armageddon will each other, and the Nazi advocates of a have to become Christians. Robertson’s millennial Reich could stand no rival God will be all in all. claim either from Jews or, in the end, Because an apocalyptic vision like this Christians. seeks to exorcise the complexities of the On the last day, however, all these ri- social order, the prospect of a soul freed valries will be settled–such is the apoca- from oppressive spirits becomes a war- lyptic promise. There will be no more rant for Robertson’s co-religionists to hatred, no more suffering; no more fail- impose their will on each individual’s ure, defeat, rejection–only vindication. psyche. Some religious traditions indeed But in their moment of triumph, caught predicate apocalyptic hope on a lifetime up in awe, wonder, and praise, those of self-abnegation and the renunciation saved must cast down their crowns of all individual markers of signi½cance around the glassy sea. There is no room and distinction. in the end time for individual distinction Even ostensibly secular societies have and self-assertion, but merely for adora- exploited the promise of such an apoca- tion of someone far beyond the self. lyptic puri½cation. Certainly the millen- nial rhetoric of the Third Reich was in- Under the auspices of the apocalyptic formed by the legacy of the conquista- imagination, a plague in Egypt becomes dors in creating a Christian ‘new world’ the beginning of redemption for a peo- based on ethnic cleansing. In Hitler’s ple, as their sacri½ces ensure that the an- Germany, there were wholesale attempts gel of death will pass over them and slay to remove those who might signify dif- their Egyptian overlords. The murder of ference, whether they were Jewish, Gyp- an Egyptian taskmaster becomes the sy, or otherwise marked with the signs of event that triggers the exodus of the uniqueness. In the end, there would have same people from Egypt across the Red been no Jew or Gentile, no Christian or Sea, into the wilderness on their way to a non-Christian, but only the Aryan. better future. The death of a Jewish Not surprisingly, the most narcissistic prophet on a cross becomes the begin- elements in apocalyptic belief require of ning of a new exodus from the slavery that is imposed by law. 1 Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas, To depict such stories of restoration, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1991), 258. reversal, and redemption is one function

Dædalus Spring 2003 109 Richard of the apocalyptic imagination: it en- rituals fail to create faith and obedience Fenn on sures that no event, no matter how in the young or to domesticate women, time unique and devastating, is felt to be irre- the apocalyptic imagination reveals that versible (in contravention of the all of these dangers, internal and exter- common-sense expectation that time nal, threaten the very survival of the flows in one direction only–from past society. to future). At times of crisis, when a way of life Societies also have sacralized their his- seems threatened with extinction, the tories in order to create the illusion that apocalyptic imagination is liable to flare they, too, can transcend the passage of up with special force. In these circum- time. The young represent the irrevers- stances, predictions of an imminent end ibility of time; they pose a standing take on new plausibility, and people may threat of innovation and change. There- prepare for a war to end all wars. The cri- fore most, perhaps all, social systems try sis may be abrupt and spectacularly de- to initiate the young into a story that structive, like the one that occurred in spans the generations and incorporates the United States on September 11, 2001. the living and the dead into a spiritual Or the crisis may be more protracted and community that transcends time. hidden from view, as in the case of spiri- In patriarchal societies, the authorized tual communities that feel themselves version of sacred history typically re- besieged by outside influences. gards women, the young, and those who For instance, the children of many think for themselves as having energies Christian fundamentalists in America and commitments that flow outside the are exposed to the images, songs, and authorized channels. In such societies, symbols of an insidiously corrupting danger to the social order is thought to popular culture–which leads some par- come from somewhere outside the sys- ents to long for the kind of Armageddon tem–from the bush or neighboring vil- foreseen by evangelical preachers like lages, from distant city-states and for- Pat Robertson. The subjection of Sunni eign empires, from in½dels and alien re- Muslims in his native Saudi Arabia to ligious movements. Such societies may similar sorts of secular temptations has therefore employ spies or a priesthood to provoked Osama bin Laden into attack- purify themselves of corrupting influ- ing the West. Pundits who argue that the ences. They keep a lookout for external cure for Islamic radicalism is more expo- threats, for superhuman and subhuman sure in Islamic schools to the secular and beings, and also for alien ideas, diseases, democratic ideals of the West are sug- foods, and suspicious strangers who are gesting as a remedy what has in fact been diabolically dif½cult to distinguish from the source of Islamic despair that their the pure of heart. own communities are running out of At a time when churches in the United time. States are having dif½culty distinguish- ing good from bad priests, and the gov- In liturgy and spectacle, in epics and ernment is on the lookout for ‘sleeper entertainment, prophets and scribes cells’ of foreign terrorists, it is no acci- make the flow of time seem more con- dent that the apocalyptic imagination tinuous, especially when it has been seri- informs public entertainments and pop- ously broken by disaster. As with the ular books. Especially when sacri½ces construction of a ½ctional narrative, fail to avert danger and death, or when writers ½t the pieces of time slowly back

110 Dædalus Spring 2003 together.2 Thus the scribes of the ½rst community by searching the past for Apocalypse & the end century c.e. took the anomalous and un- precedent and prediction: for the mean- of time ½nished life of Jesus and gave it prece- ing of signals and messages, of clues and dents in Moses and Elijah, David and signs, that many had noticed but which Solomon, while projecting it into a glori- relatively few had explicitly understood ous future of return, restoration, and re- or announced. For some, America’s war venge. The scribal community similarly against terrorism became part of the an- took the destruction of Jerusalem and ½t cient struggle between East and West, it into the apocalyptic narrative of the Greece and Persia, the people of Babylon destruction and return of once and fu- and the people of Israel. There is no ture cities. place in such a story for the United At the same time, once a society begins States to sacri½ce its sovereignty to a col- to live in the shadow of apocalyptic ex- lective body such as the un: no reason pectation, prophets and scribes, com- to consult with allies, to avoid the use of mentators and pundits, begin to search nuclear arms, or to restrain from pre- for latent or disguised signs that time is emptive strikes. Here again is Pat Rob- running out. Some search for signs of ertson: “An independent America could internal defection and subversion, oth- point out Satan’s lies . . . if America goes ers for the intrusion of alien ideas and down, all hope is lost to the rest of the 3 people, in order to issue warnings about world.” what is becoming imminent. They in- With the end in sight, the old rules are quire of ancient apocalyptic books and of little use, and it makes little difference oracles, of sibyls and divines, who re- what Moses or any other traditional au- membered the future and predicted it in thority may have said. Even religious ob- the past: an exercise in retroactive fore- servance offers no guarantee of ½nal per- sight. fection. Aliens may be friendly but dan- Such defenses against the sheer force gerous, and evil mimics the good. When of time allow a society to draw a line it is hard to distinguish allies from foes, a between those in their midst who are charismatic leader may well emerge, for following the authorized version of the whom no customary title is suf½cient, sacred story, and those who are follow- and who calls on his or her followers to ing alien sources of inspiration. It is undertake new duties, take on new risks, these latter, the apostates and the faith- and to make sacri½ces without the guar- less, or–in the lexicon of the Christian antee of immediate success or reward. Right–the secular humanists and the Charismatic leaders–like Robertson, Christians in liberal churches, who are a like bin Laden–offer their followers sinister ½fth column undermining the new opportunities for self-denial and foundations of society and preventing self-immolation, while promising com- the people of God from opposing the mensurate rewards at the end of time. work of Satan. In the weeks after September 11, a vari- To live in the expectation that time will ety of Christian commentators ful½lled end permits the expression of chronic, the traditional function of the scribal anticipatory mourning for a world about to be lost, and supports a keen public in- 2 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Stud- terest in the history and archaeology of ies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford Uni- lost worlds. There is no way to know versity Press, 2000), 17. I am indebted to Mi- chael Wood for this reference. 3 Robertson, The New World Order, 256.

Dædalus Spring 2003 111 Richard who is going to make the ½nal cut in his- apocalypse is expected ½nally to liberate Fenn on tory, and who is going to be left behind people from the spirits that have pos- time once and for all. As Frank Kermode sug- sessed their souls. But it also removes gests, the apocalyptic notion of a critical any basis for personal freedom: only the period of transition has been changed orthodox and right-minded will survive. into a sense of our own day as being “an It is not surprising that the radical reli- age of perpetual crisis in morals and pol- gious Right in this country continues to itics. And so, changed by our special beat its apocalyptic drums to mobilize pressures, subdued by our skepticism, support for conflict in the Middle East. the paradigms of apocalypse continue to What is surprising is the willingness lie under our ways of making sense of even of liberal, mainline churches to the world.”4 continue to keep apocalyptic visions in As the names of Jonestown, Waco, and their arsenal of belief. There has hardly Heaven’s Gate should remind us, apoca- been a century in the last two millennia lyptic demands for self-immolation have when these beliefs did not hearten the been openly pursued by a not insigni½- poor and the despairing–but they have cant number of Americans. We need also encouraged the vicious and the vio- also to consider the increasing populari- lent to believe that time is on their side. ty of Eastern religious notions of a self These beliefs have done enough damage eventually to be dissolved into the ocean in the last two thousand years to warrant of the cosmos, ½nally to be relieved of fundamental rethinking on the part of the burdens of time that accompany a the mainline churches. separate existence. For those who ½nd What might encourage the mainline the present world either offering too lit- churches to divest themselves of these tle in the way of satisfaction or too much apocalyptic beliefs that have long en- in the way of uncertainty, apocalypses couraged ethnic and national hatreds? satisfy the desire to wipe out the world It might help to recall that dreams of a and, with it, the last vestiges of the sin- pitched battle between East and West gular self. were Hellenistic and Mesopotamian be- Thus the apocalyptic imagination not fore they were biblical. It might also help only illustrates Marx’s aphorisms about to recall that they were part of Virgil’s religion being “the sigh of the oppressed imperial myth of the Trojans who left creature” and “the heart of a heartless the ashes of their own city and sailed for world”; it also legitimates an assault on the shores of Italy: apocalyptic visions of the psyche. That assault is disguised, a Roman empire that would never run however, as a last-ditch attempt to re- out of space or time. move an oppressive force that threatens There is nothing, in short, inherently not only the society but the individual. Jewish or Christian or Muslim about In this respect the apocalyptic vision apocalyptic imagery. And if our religious follows the inner logic of rites of exor- leaders want to defuse the potential for cism, especially those that focus on murderous conflicts between rival cul- young women who refuse to be domesti- tures, they would do well to uproot the cated or on children who claim to have remnants of the apocalyptic imagination their own sources of inspiration and au- in their own traditions–and disavow the thority. Like a collective exorcism, the fantasy that a ½nal orgy of violence will liberate the faithful, once and for all, 4 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 28. from the burdens of time.

112 Dædalus Spring 2003 Poems by Susan Howe

Secrecy let me light you in In shadow something other echoed and re-echoed only

The dark who can veneer it That conjoint abstraction will come to snow let us go back

Dædalus Spring 2003 113 Perilous quillwork needlework Need wheat for an ogee epigram if old Lille silk one ogival sliver if miniature bobbin come from dark underwood again again if reeling wild silk precede reeler

114 Dædalus Spring 2003 1775 landscape America blindstitched to French edge silk damask cover Silhouette of Gothic city soaring bird needlework Quiet under false scant lonely ecstatic incessant white on white coverlet

Dædalus Spring 2003 115 held once quiet stillicide at one or two removes no brought back into touch

Because pain is life we want you too Disquiet you’ve enough about us

116 Dædalus Spring 2003 Susan Howe, State University of New York Distinguished Professor of English, is the author of several books of poetry, including “The Europe of Trusts” (2002) and “Pierce-Arrow” (1999). A Guggenheim Fellow, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2002. These poems are drawn from a series entitled “Bed Hangings II,” forthcoming in “The Midnight” from New Directions.

© 2003 by Susan Howe

Dædalus Spring 2003 117 Fiction by Rick Moody

Fish Story

Now the Word of the Lord came unto Jo- what qualities proved him deserving of nah Feldman, of the Feldman family of such a visitation? What made this kid Maspeth, Queens, which regional name Jonah Feldman different from say Stan- in the language of the native population ley Rabinowitz, just up the block, much connotes place of bad waters, his father smarter, made his parents happier, went being Hyman Feldman, Orthopedist, to a fancy Ivy League school, embarked whose business was at the clinic near the upon medical residency in the Midwest. Mt. Zion Cemetery. As the Word of the Almost caused his mother to have an Lord came unto his son, Hyman Feldman aneurysm she was so happy. Hard to say was on call setting the broken wrists of a why, but if you pursue honor it will elude neighborhood kid who’d fallen off his you. The Word of the Lord had not come scooter at the storefront clinic of which unto Stanley, bypassed him entirely, nor the prophet spoke, not too far from Ro- had the Word of the Lord come to Louise sa’s World Famous Pizza. Hyman’s fa- Luchese who lived up the street and who ther was also Jonah, whose father was wanted to take the vows of a nun in spite Abraham, and so on, Jonahs and Hy- of her blasphemous but enthusiastic mans and Abrahams and Zechariahs he- wantonness, nor to anyone else in lixing into the past. Maspeth or in the entire borough of Anyway, the Word of the Lord came to Queens. No, the Word of the Lord came this Jonah Feldman, but why this guy, unto Jonah Feldman, the only young adult in his neighborhood to have printed Rick Moody is the author of the novels “Garden business cards for himself on his twenty- State,” “The Ice Storm,” and “Purple America”; fourth birthday that said Kosher Fag on two collections of stories, “The Ring of Brightest the back, by which he intended to dis- Angels Around Heaven” and “Demonology”; and seminate through an elegant but unpre- a non½ction work about Nathaniel Hawthorne possessing font the fact that he both kept and his own family entitled “The Black Veil.” kosher and liked boys. Though lately he With Darcey Steinke, he edited “Joyful Noise: seemed like he was less often kosher and The New Testament Revisited.” He is the recipient more often liking boys. He ate the occa- of an Addison Metcalf Award from the American sional cheeseburger, which would have Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim infuriated his grandmother had she Fellowship. His shorter work and journalism have known, and he felt in this ritual both a appeared widely. ½ne disgust and an admiration for him- © 2003 by Rick Moody 118 Dædalus Spring 2003 self. He went to the Hispanic butchers in the neighborhood it was a digni½ed Fish the neighborhood, and he drove on the thing to af½x this symbol to the male- Story Sabbath, etc. He was putting more ener- pattern baldness of his genetic tribe. gy into the fag part of his ½ve-year plan. They didn’t know, for a person does not For example, the delirious and profound know what is in his neighbor’s heart, word cock was his companion, his spur that the black accessory bespoke a will- and staff, the word rather than the thing, ingness to lead the community; the yar- its Middle-English origins, to mete with mulke was strong and noble and it could Cocke they asked how to do, its blunt make courageous such a one as Jonah Anglo-Saxon simplicity, what man are Feldman, to whom the Word of the Lord thou, when thy cock is up, its endurance as a came now. And why not, because he loved slang word, its endurance as an image in by the Word, the Word was with him his image repertoire, E’er his small Cock and in him. were yet a fortnight old, how with majestick The particular messenger of the Lord, Vigour it should rise. In boys he saw it, the that night, it should be admitted, was a word, and its syllable rang in his ear, a young blond fellow by the name of Car- transgression in want and a transgres- olina, or this was the name he gave, sion in name; it was the name that gave though it was clearly an assumed name, him to wanting, he had come to wanting for the very air of these nightclubs circu- now, could put it off no longer, and the lated with assumed identities, with cal- wanting made the name ring like the culated anonymities, with the sorrow of church bells of Maspeth in his head. castoff selves, with the shadows of Jonah Feldman was a Kosher Fag, his par- things glimpsed only between songs in ents could not deny it, for his fealty to the clamp light of the deejay’s booth. cock was perfect, his love for cock, his Here the bartender is dimly perceptible nurturance for cock. A hot cock has no con- in the black light by the cash register, science, it is said, but still he worshiped it, here couples appear and then vanish into though most of the clubs that he fre- the men’s room, here are the men kiss- quented with their thundering break ing in the cadences of a strobe light. All beats and handsome but narcissistic reg- assumed identities, all assumed mas- ulars would not take kindly to a Kosher culinities, in leather pants and mesh t- Fag from Maspeth, Queens, more Mas- shirts, while afflicted selves like Jonah peth than queen, alas, with his kinky dark hovered just out of range. The particular hair already receding, his soft middle, heartache of Jonah Feldman was to his proofreading job at Price Water- come to this place and to see love house. His eyebrows met in the middle, whirling about him and to know that he despite nervous and painful tweezing. was only enough a part of the action to He had no fashion sense at all. He would know that he never would participate in buy any reasonable clothes at Century full, like a gelding who stands off from 21. He knew nothing about style, he liked the herd. sports, even baseball, he couldn’t stand Thus: one night among the break Liza Minelli. He would have been happy beats at a certain club, WestWorld, very in sackcloth or polyester, eating locusts far west in the city of New York, Jonah and cheeseburgers, as long as he could Feldman of Maspeth, Queens, managed wear his yarmulke. The boys in the clubs to ½nd himself dancing with a blond with their leather pants, they did not get from the Bible Belt. It could not be, this the yarmulke, they did not know that in cavorting, for many months had tran-

Dædalus Spring 2003 119 Fiction by spired since last he knew love. And yet it Carolina, in this epiphany, was saying Rick Moody was. Carolina smoked un½ltered ciga- something to Jonah Feldman, the words rettes, was too thin, was possessed of a were becoming clear now, they were be- large, severe nose and a cruel laugh. Yet coming audible, they were in the process behold that one incisor that jutted out in of revealing themselves in the ½eld of the front part of his lowers, behold that music playing in the room. Here they cowlick. Carolina said, Here take some of come now. Empiricists and doubters, this, proffered a certain controlled sub- take note, the actual Word of the Lord, as stance. Frolic with me, Queens boy. It was spoken in a certain nightclub in New all too good to be true, dancing to the York City, in a year of done darkness: hurtling of the music, dancing to the Arise, arise! Neglected servant, arise! Jonah cascading of machines, all too good to be Feldman of Maspeth, Queens, arise! For I have true, because untrue, in a way, for now no a favor to ask of you, young Jonah, forsaken other man was in the room, they had all Jonah, I have a favor! Lend to me your ears! vanished, there was just the music and For I am not in the habit of talking to you in the boy called Carolina, because when this way! I’m asking for you to lay aside your the Word of the Lord comes to a room, it is cares, neglected servant, I’m asking for you to as if none other inhabits it. The some- draw near to My request. I’m asking if you what soft and somewhat slovenly Jonah should consider performing the following task as Feldman kissed the pseudonymous Car- My representative. I’m asking if you would pre- olina, who had his tongue deep in Jonah pare for a long journey, to a certain village, a Feldman’s mouth. It should have been village by the name of Lynchburg, where you impossible for Carolina to talk. The con- should search out those with bad reading skills, trolled substance was beginning its navi- those who cannot read. And there you should gations in Jonah’s organs, the controlled instruct them in the matter of reading, young substance which started with the letter k, Jonah. Because in Lynchburg the standardized or which had a k in it, though maybe it test scores, to speak in your parlance, are aston- seemed so just because of Jonah’s preoc- ishingly low. They are not hearing the different cupation with the word cock, which also ways I spill My Name on the page, they are not had a k as did kaon, an unstable meson hearing the many poems in which I conceal My- particle, kaph, the eleventh letter of the self, they are not hearing the many soaring mel- Hebrew alphabet, katzenjammer, kestrel, odies in which I am so various, My melodies of kiddush, kadish, Kislev, kitsch, klutz. They ecstasy and profligacy and enthusiasm and woe, were kissing, and at some point the con- they are not hearing that I am in all words, that trolled substance was collapsing them, I alike ½ll the household measuring cup and the and that’s when the room began to seem mighty ocean, that I adorn all empty places, kaleidoscopic. For if you have ever won- and that I dwarf all mountains and all sky- dered at the circumstances which are scrapers. They do not know the many pronunci- congenial to the Word of the Lord, trust ations of My Unspeakable Name, Jonah, so I that an unearthly light always comes from ask if you will go to Lynchburg, when you are within, and trust that a voice calls out ½nished with the oblivion of this particular kiss, where none should be. The voice of God there to deal with the splendid wickedness that I should not have come from Carolina, as have described. I pick you for this task for no it should not come from a West Indian reason but that I love you! So remember while woman who cleans people’s apartments you are in Lynchburg, in a whole lot of trouble, in wealthy neighborhoods, and yet it as it is already written, that I love you. Travel does. safe!

120 Dædalus Spring 2003 His hangover the next morning, for it had whispered into the ear of Jonah Fish was now the next morning, was an Feldman. Story affliction such as he had rarely suffered The words were unforgettable, not- in his short life. It was as if he were molt- withstanding the fact that Jonah had for- ing his very skull, his jellied eyes were gotten much of the evening. They came shish’d on flaming skewers, and he was back to him now, and the heart of Jonah sorely afraid. He was in Maspeth, Feldman was heavy with dread at these Queens, trying to reconstruct the night fresh remembrances. These words, per- prior, and his mother was banging on haps, were the thing that had made him the door, wanting to know if he was sorely afraid, that made his occluded going to take the morning repast, his arteries skitter as with an sos. He tried favorite, which she had made especially to eat breakfast as usual, but there was a for him. It wasn’t safe that he shouldn’t weakness in him whenever the words eat, etc. With the scrofulous but prag- returned to his ailing consciousness. Of matic logic of the hungover, Jonah real- course, this was evident to his beloved ized, for he was indeed sorely afraid, that mother, who kept intruding, Are you feel- he needed not to be living at this address ing well? Honey, will you examine him? any longer, he needed not to wake with There’s something wrong, I can see it. How- bite marks on his nipples, pained in cer- ever, his father, the excellent orthope- tain nether regions, he needed not to dist, erred on the side of medicinal dis- have his favorite breakfast prepared for belief where his children were con- him each and every morning by a moth- cerned, would not examine his son, as er who no longer knew him in his entire- even Abraham himself would not give ty. The plan in which he saved for a his son a reflex test, nor perform a throat down payment on a condominium culture, unto the moment when the Lord through the largesse of Price Water- said that the sacri½ce should now be per- house was no longer a valid plan. He formed. On weak legs, Jonah Feldman, in could not talk about the half of his life of slippers and robe, walked out of his which his parents did not approve, a por- house in search of the copy of Newsday tion of his life now growing to be more on the front step, but transmogri½ed like two-thirds. Indeed when he got up now, into a prophet of the Word. and put on his terrycloth robe and slip- It would be best if it could be reported pers and went into the kitchen to face that Jonah Feldman of Maspeth, his goodly parents–his father with Queens, was such a faithful servant of newspaper and bagel, his mother with his recent hallucination of the Lord that he spatula and coffee–they were looking at immediately, in his bathrobe, embarked him with a noxious disappointment. His on the purchase of plane tickets from the mother was going to cry. Why was airport called LaGuardia, from which a everyone looking as if they might cry, commercial airliner would then take when all that he had done was kiss a him to our nation’s capitol, where he beautiful, elegant boy called Carolina would board a commuter flight to and take a drug with k somewhere in its Lynchburg. There, he would descend name, after which he’d had a tongue in into the pit of wickedness called Lynch- his mouth, followed by some events he burg, so as to prophesy variously as to could not remember, including bite the thousands of words hidden in each and marks on his nipples–wait!–there was every word, the secret languages of the also the strange monologue that Carolina Lord hidden in plain sight, etc. Unfortu-

Dædalus Spring 2003 121 Fiction by nately, it must be set down here that rency that he had not used the night Rick Moody Jonah Feldman instead walked up the before to secure the services of a male block, halted before Kaplan’s Deli- harlot. So he paid the fare and went catessen, tried to dial Carolina from a down into the boat, so that he might scribbled phone number in the pocket of journey to southeastern Connecticut, far his robe. Number out of service. His inten- from the presence of the Lord. tion was to ask Carolina, if indeed this How quickly that tempest was upon was his name, to repeat these numinous them! The high-speed boat, the Ledyard, things Jonah believed he had heard the designed to be faster than the clotted night before. For if he had heard them, was federal highway grid in transit to the it not the case that Jonah had been heavily taxed casino, was equipped with selected for a great and terrifying bur- all useful conjuring devices, with a global den? positioning system, with Loran, with depth Jonah Feldman, in the convexity of ½nders, forward thrusters, etc. It even uncertainty, made as to flee from featured the Weather Channel, on a Maspeth, Queens. The fleeing came as monitor in the cabin. Yet the spokes- naturally as breathing or eating, for he models broadcasting from the Weather was not even observant these days, nor Channel could not explain how this new was he old enough to bear the Word of the weather event, soon to collide with a Lord, and he was not a professional suc- northeasterly storm streaking down the cess, nor did he have the ½re in him eastern seaboard from Newfoundland, which might make him a logical spokes- had so quickly cohered into an unpre- man for the poor or spiritually chal- dictable category four hurricane, name of lenged. So he fled. His destination, on this Katherine, just as the mariners of the particular morning, was the township of craft were steering off of Port Jefferson. Port Washington, of the island which The tempest, when it neared the coast, stretches easterly into the sea, where a which it did with fearsome alacrity, certain high-speed boat, the Ledyard, made all other such storms look like the owned and operated by the natives of digital animations from our national this land, served as a ferry service pur- dream factory. Waves so high that they posed upon their sovereign tribal nation, disappeared into clouds, gales that be- which in turn featured an emporium of times lifted the boat from the very sea, games of chance and skill. Good busi- rain and hail, all manner of precipita- ness for all involved, boat, casino, taxes, tion. The tempest was ancient, mythical, jobs. Since it was the Sabbath, the Led- and the mariners despaired, for their yard would be sparsely occupied, except high-speed boat was disabled and adrift by the most grizzled of habitual gam- and they could no longer divine their blers. They’d be making their way to the position. They each shouted to individ- casino in an attempt to win back large ual gods, which gods had as many names parcels of gold and real estate they’d lost as there are words to describe them, like- the week before betting on sports events. wise they shouted to their money man- Yes, this would perhaps be a place that agers and insurers, their polarity thera- the Lord would not chance to look for pists, their yoga instructors, their talk Jonah Feldman, formerly of Maspeth, radio hosts, their acupuncturists, their Queens, now a slightly disheveled man chiropractors, their psychopharmacolo- wearing terrycloth bathrobe and slip- gists. And then they began throwing pers, clutching a hundred dollars of cur- things over the side. They threw over-

122 Dædalus Spring 2003 board the magazine rack from the cabin life rings or other flotation devices that Fish of the ship, they threw out all the sweet- might be thrown off the boat with Story meats and foodstuffs from the snack bar, whomever was ½rst to go. The captain they tossed out television monitors, they chastised him with popular and offen- threw out their baggage, their expensive sive terms of derision for the unmanly, overnight bags, they threw out the and then he additionally remarked, Just benches, they threw overboard at least get your fat ass topside, if you want to live. one small dog. For the ship was going Above board, where the windows had down and, if so, would go in a denuded all been shattered, passengers bled and state, that even one life might be thus moaned and gnashed their teeth and saved till the last. The dread of the Lord huddled in a small maintenance closet. was heavy upon the mariners of the Led- Here the captain laid out his vision for yard, likewise the passengers. orderly abandonment of the craft: I have Jonah Feldman, who knew ½nally that a number of these matchsticks that I use for there was no locale to which he might flee, toothpicks and I have busted one of these very nonetheless attempted to secret himself matchsticks down to a nub, and we are going in the men’s room on the boat, the comfort to draw lots from these–one person, one station, even if this were unlikely to matchstick. I propose that we toss the ½rst impede the all-seeing omnipotence of the poor sonofabitch selects the nub overboard Lord. He drank a flat cherry Coke and with a lifejacket, since I don’t know how much muttered that his parents would never longer we can count on the seaworthiness of forgive him, his neighborhood would this boat. Of the twelve miserable gam- never forgive him, his employers would blers in the maintenance closet, all never forgive him, never mind he had agreed to the plan, naturally, as it had a done nothing, had never asked by way of betting aspect. They cast lots, and the supplication or through any other nub, as if the captain had ½xed the game, means, to become a servant of the Lord. fell to Jonah Feldman. Gamblers are In consideration of these requests, he fell readers ½rst and foremost, they are read- fast asleep, because he suffered a little bit ers of the skies, readers of the faces of with the demon narcolepsy, at least where dealers, readers of auguries, of birds, of afflictions of the heart were concerned. dates, of numbers, of names; gamblers It was here, asleep on a commode, that are diviners, no flock passes overhead he was discovered by the captain of the that is not portentous to them. These aforementioned craft. Wake up, buster! gamblers had their schemes, they had One of those taciturn mariners with their racing forms, they had their ideas hands like catcher’s mitts, with a ruddy, about the order of the things, they knew striated face, with a knitted cap, with a prophets and prophecy, and when Jonah scar running perpendicular to his jaw Feldman was revealed, through posses- line and down below his chin line to his sion of the nub, as a man of particularly very breast. Might as well have had a dark luck, the gamblers fell upon him in wooden leg. He wore a complete uni- a ½erce inquiry into his signi½cance. An form of foul-weather gear. Wake up! And older man with cracked spectacles and get your ass above, because we are going to excessive amounts of cologne, offered a draw lots to see who to throw off the boat brief kind word, before demanding, Just ½rst! The ship once again listed violently clue us in here, what’s with the instantaneous to one side. In a timid voice, Jonah hurricane, and what’s your job, and where do inquired if there were not lifeboats or you come from, and where are you going, and

Dædalus Spring 2003 123 Fiction by what is your ethnic and racial self-description fathomless deep, into the dark draperies Rick Moody and why have you brought us to this dark of the underworld, and he was gone. place? Whereupon the sea ceased from rag- Jonah Feldman cried out to them all, ing. I’m a Jew and I’m a homosexual person, I am Immediately, the high-speed ferry, the both, and I won’t dissemble here, even if you Ledyard, in its grim, senseless course should throw me over the side. And I fear the came to a halt, too. Ahead were the Lord, I mean the actual God in actual Heav- splendid cliffs of Block Island. Gulls flut- en, Author of both sea and the dry land, also tered above the breakers, sentries at the Author of the results of all games of chance entrance to this more paci½c kingdom. and presidential elections, likewise Author of Twenty miles or more the mariners must the stars and equations of physics, including have come by chance, buffeted by the Planck’s constant. The gamblers saw tempest, soon to have washed up on the immediately, at least according to their rocks here, had not the storm vanished. Manichean philosophies, that having a The sun peeked from behind a riot of Kosher Fag on board their boat was a very clouds. The gamblers were prepared to bad omen, even if in public settings they cash out. There would be no ½ve-card professed a certain acceptance of both stud today. No craps. categories attested to by Feldman’s eth- In the meantime, the Lord had prepared nic, political, and religious self-designa- a great ½sh to swallow up Jonah. It is possi- tion. They didn’t want to throw Jonah to ble, of course, that the Lord might have his doom, because they ½gured it too beached him on Plum Island, nearby, would be impossibly bad luck, and where the federal government was tor- because it seemed morally dubious, but turing monkeys and baboons with bacil- neither did they want him on the boat. lus anthracis, where they re½ned and So Jonah said to them, Take me up and aerosolized Dengue Fever and Han- throw me into the sea, since it’s for my sake tavirus and Ebola and the Plague. This that this tempest is upon you. By which he would have been appropriate recom- meant that there’s always a tempest, and pense, but it did not come to pass. The always a guilty party, and he was willing Lord did not beach him there, did not let to be done with the brief interval of his him wonder about grace and mercy promising life and proofreading job at while scraping off ulcerated nodules in Price Waterhouse, he was willing now to the twilight of some hemorrhagic be courageous and dead, for tempests swoon. Likewise, the Lord might have are full of revelation. He had done what imprisoned him in a nearby East Hamp- he ought not, he had avoided his duty, ton restaurant, working without bene½ts and so he must perish. Jonah Feldman alongside a number of foreign nationals, asked only for a lifejacket, which at ½rst washing dishes, and bunking with these seemed plausible, but then there was a foreign nationals in a trailer park. There violent rolling of the craft and a wave of he would have had time to rethink his such magnitude that it was as if a sheet resistance to the Lord, his disinclination was drawn over them, and the twelve to undertake the work that had been gamblers and the crew and the captain given to him to perform. Instead, the knew that their destruction was immi- Lord prepared a great ½sh. nent. They picked up Jonah Feldman, Into the water Jonah Feldman tum- humbled and resigned, and they shoved bled, into that tempestuous water him through a shattered portal, into the according to which there was no up and

124 Dædalus Spring 2003 down, nor East and West, just expanses in question was not that certain kind of Fish of darkness which compassed about him shark, that animal which must move or Story even to his soul, and he felt the last bit of die. It circled around the missile of air in him bubbling forth, he saw the Jonah Feldman as gravity sucked him jumble of images from his life, his tuckus down toward the continental shelf. It smacked in the Long Island Jewish Hos- circled but did not bite. There would pital; his bar mitzvah, and the speech he have been ribbons of Jonah. The redac- gave there on the subject of great Jewish tors have spoken. A second ½sh was baseball players in the early part of the summoned. The ½sh was leviathan, in twentieth century; the ½rst older man particular, it was the blessed Blue Whale, who, behind a druggist’s in Maspeth, hunted to the edge of its elimination Queens, begged to be allowed to part the from this world, and it bore down upon mysterious folds of Jonah’s trousers; Jonah. The Lord actually contacted the likewise the girl his parents nervously Blue Whale, preliminarily, asking for found to be his associate, perhaps one indulgence in this matter, Friend Whale, day to be his bride; then her contemptu- may I bother you to swallow this particular ous whispers to him at a temple dance; human being for a brief interval? I know you weeping one night after taunts from are an eater of plants and a peaceful being, high-school friends; awake later, wan- and I know you fear for your life, as there are dering the second floor of their house in anglers in pursuit of you, but this human Maspeth, Queens, encountering his being needs some three days to reflect and grandmother, her hair uncoiled about atone, and I would prefer him to spend time her shoulders, whispering of the War; where the surroundings provide for both reve- male prostitutes solicited on the avenue lation and the great delicacy known as ½sh down by the subway, some of them gen- cheese. tle and loving; a hundred dates refused; Fish cheese! The Lord’s wonders are remonstrances from his bosses at Price mysterious to behold! In the northern Waterhouse; and then, again, dancing countries where it is considered a delica- with Carolina, until the voice came to cy, it is called hákarl, putre½ed ½sh that is him, the recollection of it, Arise! Arise! buried for up to a half a year. (It is tolera- Redactors gifted in the study and ble only in advanced states of inebriety.) interpretation of ½shes have long been The whale replied, Happy to serve, as I engaged to comment on the manuscript must, its melancholy eyes downcast. Tak- of Jonah Feldman: seine haulers, surf ing a mighty breath into its awesome casters, trawlermen, pearl divers, har- lungs, it dove deep toward the arc of poonists, fly rod specialists, an entire Jonah’s fall, and swallowed him up, community of anglers. The opinion of sweeping in alongside Jonah a healthy these redactors is that the ½rst ½sh sent portion of plankton and a few automo- for Jonah by the Lord, namely a variety of bile tires. Its teeth were not so much large shark not unknown in those north- knives as brushes, Jonah recognized, or ern waters, absolutely could not have so he felt coming out of the hallucina- swallowed him, was not physically able. tion of his afterlife, a purple corridor Moreover, a shark is stupider than any populated by dead acquaintances large thing in creation. Sharks were described on television programs. The made for the sole reason that deadly throat of the ½sh was not so much gullet things are beautiful. Therefore, the ½sh as waterfall, in which whole swamps of

Dædalus Spring 2003 125 Fiction by vegetal life swirled and mixed in a stew miracle in it? Prophecy is a kind of lan- Rick Moody of nutrition. Before he even had a guage, and language is a kind of imagi- chance, he was swept over these falls and nation, and imagination is a kind of pummeled by the squeezing and dousing desire, and desire knows no contain- of ½sh peristalsis. It was an hour or so in ment, wants what it cannot have, and in that esophageal coil, and it reminded wanting it sees. So Jonah Feldman had him of the time he had the mri, though three days in the belly of a ½sh to think, without sedative. But the entertainment to reflect. Jonah reflected. On the ½rst had not even begun, for after the hour of day, after being bitten by something, acid-drenched peristaltic massage, he some predator that he had to squeeze to fell end over end into a large unlit room, death with his bare hands, Jonah reflect- about the size of a domestic recreational ed, and in the night he likewise reflect- vehicle, spongy floors, about one-third ed, though strictly speaking there were full of liquid as well as marine life and no days or nights there. At ½rst, these plants and man-made plastics. Among reflections had the cast of his own life, the ½nds: a short-wave radio, still func- and he saw the silhouettes of the tioning; a cardboard box, containing red Catskills, he saw his parents playing rubber gymnasium balls; a beach cooler, cards, he recalled the night on which housing a six-pack of a bland domestic he’d been assaulted on 21st St., he saw beer; and one human skeleton. Before various academic contests, from elemen- long, he resigned himself to the temper- tary school, from Hebrew School. Then ature of the mixture, and to yet another the cast of these reflections took on, shower of surprises that would rain instead, the rosy tones of desire, the down upon his head from above, includ- physiques of certain boys and then cer- ing the occasional muffler, or other inju- tain men, the curve just above the hip of rious missile, as well as live eel or skate a man when he is no longer wearing any or harvest of seaweed. clothes, likewise the lips of men, and the And there was the smell! The rankness tendons in the necks of men busy about of the ½sh cheese, of death, of eternal their exertions, calves of men, abdomi- decay, where every ½shy thing began its nal muscles, and these particular reflec- decomposition, where living things were tions were good and many hours passed scorched and liquidated into a sequence according to them. But then, without of vitamins and protein chains. It was an companion or fellow with whom to awful smell. Jonah Feldman had been in commiserate, he thought of the Lord, a nightclub in the West Village only the conceived of that thing inconceivable, night before, where every man looked he worked around the edges of the Lord, like an angel, where the lighting was low felt the impossible heft, or at least point- and the promises perfect, and now he ed in the direction of the Lord, by enu- was in the belly of a whale that ate auto merating such things as the no-hitter, parts and shat them into the North the paintings of Mark Rothko, the ½lm Atlantic when the spirit moved. It was performances of Judy Davis, all of which only so long before he was himself seemed to suggest the Lord, and amid his excretory. A miracle that he lived thus reflections he composed a prayer for the far, to be sure, that he lived inside the forsaken, memorizing it until he could stomach of the whale, but what good is a call out its words in his foul-smelling story of prophecy if it doesn’t have a imprisonment:

126 Dædalus Spring 2003 Thou Celestial Agency, Fish Who smiles on boys beaten senseless in the gymnasiums of America, Story Cleave near; Cleave near to the contused, both those who in their disgrace tell tell tell, And those who mutter nothing and enfold memories deep in the ½ling cabinets Of dark juvenilia, Thou Celestial Agency, Perform not thy vanishing act again; Shower in½nite compassion on those who know polysyllabs But rarely utter them; Love all lovers in exile; Love the impossibly obese, love the leprous, love the homely, love the Embittered, love transsexuals, love eunuchs and pedophiles, Love all abdicators and deniers; Love all those with unusual gaits and bad speech defects, Love Jews and Armenians, Palestininians and Tibetans, love Chechens and Albanians; Let the names of hatred be made into names of Delight, Thou Celestial Agency, Until all degradation is past; Bear up accretions of words and names of disgust, And build a new ocean to contain them; Thou Celestial Agency; Thy ideas are sometimes bunk, But you bisected day and night and thus fabricated the dusk and the dawn, The perfect poise between things; Love thou the disenfranchised who crowd around your absent shadow, unable to Finish their business; For you made masculine power and made the football coaches and posturing, Steroid-addicted simians who are drunk with it, Bear up those who lie awake at night, pacing the floor in convulsions of Exile, who weep such torrents that dry ½elds everywhere are irrigated with the Floods of their misery–which tears are more numerous? Give the batterers a stern talking to, Thou Celestial Agency, For they have bilked every shareholder; For they have staffed and directed every army, For they have directed every dictatorship, For they have purged every dissenter, For they have applied the electrodes to every political prisoner, For they have committed every genocide. How the hour grows short, Celestial Agency, there will soon be only the batterers And their veiled wives, Show us your justice and we will lay down our vanities.

When Jonah had ½nished his prayer, graphed for the nightly news. However, there was a sigh in the world, and the the man at the site in the fouled terry- Lord caucused with the Blue Whale and cloth robe went unseen into the bush, gave him instructions, and the ½sh then with no camera nor reporter to demand vomited up Jonah Feldman on the coast of him that he tell the story of the mira- of Virginia, next to an expensive and ill- cle of three days in the entrails of a decorated hotel. The whale, now North Atlantic whale. beached, was immediately photo-

Dædalus Spring 2003 127 Fiction by What is the greatness of a great per- accumulations of soft pine needles. Rick Moody son? That person is not ashamed to say I What better emblem of the imperial don’t know. For this was the predicament reign of the Lord, the movement of noble of Jonah Feldman of Maspeth, Queens, beasts upon their last free ramble. Jonah who now smelled like the secret life of a Feldman was sure he was dreaming, by bulimic! His slippers were torn! His reason of his ordeal. For in a moment, beard was three days grown out! His Jonah again heard the Word of the Lord, thinning hair was matted against his almost as if the voice came from a talking scalp! Jonah Feldman, prophet of the horse, although he was pretty sure that Lord, now resembled most a deinstitu- talking horses were con½ned to televi- tionalized schizophrenic, and the citi- sion situation comedies: Arise! And go to zens of the commonwealth where he Lynchburg, Jonah Feldman, for I believe that had washed up knew not what to think we had an agreement that you did not honor. of this, a St. Jerome in the wilderness, a Go there and preach to the failed readers and holy man whose martyrdom is to write interpreters. Do as I have bid thee. the Word of the Lord. And they therefore Jonah, the prophet of the Lord, had not feared this new ghostly presence in the had a decent meal in days, excepting countryside. Nevertheless, the fashion some sea scallops that he had eaten in stylings of the itinerant psychotic were the Japanese style while inside the ½sh, generally favored by the Lord, and if man and he was hoping to have some Chinese were indeed made in the image of the food, or perhaps a curry, anything but Lord, might one not conjecture that the seafood. Yet now he understood that raver in the countryside was most what ignoring any voice in the wilderness was the Lord himself looked like, or else why no longer an option, unless he wished to such a prevalence among men? see earthquake, flood, volcanic eruption, In the course of his march, Jonah bioterror incident, etc. Through a vari- meanwhile chanced upon the most beauti- ety of means of transport, including ful place he had ever seen, for there were rowboat, freight train, eighteen-wheel not many beautiful places in the bor- truck, and of course the lowly pedestrian ough of Queens, not like this wilderness means of transportation, Jonah, in at the seaside, with its wild horses. It three-days time, traveled directly from seemed scarcely possible that he could the islands of the mighty ocean, across have come from the belly of a ½sh, only the bay, past crabbing operations, to walk but two or three miles away shrimp boats, deep-sea rigs, past the from an ill-decorated hotel to ½nd him- naval mariners in their crafts, inland, self in pristine wilderness, where horses across the James River, past hunters and gamboled and galloped and did not take moonshiners, farmers of tobacco, farm- the bit. He saw the pack of them, their ers of dairy, truck farmers, agricultural- manes stirred in the breezes, their ists of all varieties, through counties haunches as sleek and perfect as any- with names like Dinwiddle and Amelia thing made by the Lord, rearing up onto and Appomattox, until he was in the their hind legs, so that the adolescent interior of the state, in the shadow of the stallions could engage in feats of skill Blue Ridge peaks. Then along a county and disport with the females. They tram- road strewn with franchises, he came to pled an open ½eld, and then the males the city of Lynchburg. He recognized a and their mares disappeared into a ½endish cloudbank above him. He felt coniferous wood, thundering across rain begin to fall. Around Jonah Feldman

128 Dædalus Spring 2003 there were the portents of the imminent look pretty bad, and I’m sorry to be a pest, but Fish destruction of Lynchburg. He could see. I am doing the work of the Lord. I will try Story For he was a prophet. He made his way not to frighten your children. directly to a certain chain store that spe- Perhaps the arrangement would have cialized in of½ce supplies, and there he persisted, were it not for the sudden begged for a felt-tip marker and such arrival of the overlord of this empire, the items as might be fashioned into sig- King of Blinders, autocrat of poor reading nage, and then he walked into the town. skills and anti-evolutionist, scheduled to At the rear entrance to a supermarket, he perform that day on his television sta- commandeered a milk crate. Further he tion for cameras national and global. He walked. was due in makeup, to have his comb- At length, he came to the television over combed over, to have his pancake broadcasting facility of a televangelist. applied, to have lipstick faintly smudged When he reached this place, he knew across his lips, though he had decried all that his life’s journey had culminated harlotry and excesses in the matter of according to the will of the Lord. There appearance. Jonah wondered, as follows: was a great evil there, and much neglect What did it mean to this man to be a of the millennia of prophecy that had lover? Did it mean to care for the indi- been organized into the books of the gent with the love that the Lord cared for Lord, for example the words of lovers, them? Did it mean to awake with Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the worry? Did it mean to attempt perfect ½eld; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up compassion? And could this guy read at early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine all? In his cavalcade of limousines, the flourish, whether the tender grape appear and King of Blinders paused for a moment in the pomegranates bud forth: there I will give front of the security gate of the televi- thee my loves. These words had been for- sion station, and in that moment, he gotten, in this spot, and many others glimpsed the repulsive freeloader in besides. And Jonah Feldman took up his front of his building, who no doubt, signage, and he af½xed language to it according to the King of Blinders, was a with the felt-tip marker known in these product of miscegenation or bastardy. lands as a Sharpie, as follows: Free Reme- The King of Blinders indicated, then, with dial Reading Lessons! Apply Herewith! And, the faintest of gestures, that an aide in beneath: In forty days, Lynchburg will be the limousine was to incline an ear to consumed by ½re. Then, in a tattered robe, him, and thus the king spake, Have that through which his capacious belly was guy removed. sometimes protuberant, and wearing The aide nodded. slippers fashioned from castoff newspa- The beating, when later administered pers, smelling like vomit and human to Jonah Feldman, was prolonged and soil, unshaven and raving, Jonah Feld- merciless. A soft answer turns away anger, it man of Maspeth, Queens, preached the is said. Not in this story. He was carried glory of reading in front of the security away by men who set records in their gate of the television station. This went high-school football leagues for sacked on for many days. At times, the workers quarterbacks. They took him to an alley of the television station fed Jonah Feld- behind a dry cleaners, long after dark, man with fast-food snacks they pur- and they knew no sympathy. First these chased on their lunch breaks. He men impugned Jonah’s dignity, telling thanked them effusively. He said, I know I him that he no longer smelled like a

Dædalus Spring 2003 129 Fiction by man, but instead smelled like an animal, And what ever happened to nonviolence, Rick Moody and then they told him that he was no Celestial Agency? man, since he would not ½ght like a Was that just a line you favored for a while? man, and many bruises were adminis- Take, I beseech thee, tered, and there was a cracking and My life from me, crunching report that issued from Jonah For it is better to die than to live. in the region of his nose, and then per- haps also from his jaw, and the men said ight have been the pain; might have he was lucky that they didn’t fuck him, M been the ordeal; might have been three just to show who was boss, but they pre- days in a ½sh’s belly, might have been ferred to fuck things that smelled a lot the drugs; might have been the loneli- better; lids of trash cans in the alley ness of many years; might have been the were used as righteous instruments by abuse of older men who loved him and these men, until Jonah’s head was abun- abandoned him; might have been the dantly swollen, and his eyes shuttered. vili½cation of generations, the vili½ca- He had much internal bleeding, and now tion that was like a second heartbeat in he was naked and alone. It occurred to his breast; might have been the night; Jonah, in his suffering, that it was all might have been the South; might have madness, that he was a mad person, that been an illness of the soul that had taken the drug that had a k in it had kicked his root in his fathers and forefathers, the ill- ass, that he had been beset by Klansmen, ness of insight, how else to explain why or their confederates, and that the Lord for some prophets it just got worse. Their had been replaced, in this instance, by families fetched these prophets and car- the knavery of this world, where all was ried them to private hospitals where knockdown-dragout, where all was knuckle they might rest, where they could be sandwiches, where all was kidney punches. given prescriptions so that they might His madness was clear, it was in his forget. Still, before all this happened, be- obsession with words to the exclusion of fore Jonah’s father and his wife came to things, his obsession was with sounds the city of Lynchburg to bear away their that rang in his head, as though the ½rst-born son, the voice of the Lord came sounds themselves were the Lord. This one more time to that delirious prophet, was not enough. He was bereft. Without Why shouldn’t I spare Lynchburg, where there the Lord to intervene, without compas- are more than sixscore thousand persons that sionate soul to tend to his wounds. He cannot discern between their right hand and was abject in the sight of the world. In their left? this abjection, he composed a second prayer, mumbling it, in his extreme affliction, in the alleys of the city of Lynchburg: Thou art a gracious Celestial Agency, Merciful and slow to anger, and of great Kindness, But why spare A town full of bigots? Why spare guys who Hate their wives and belittle them? Why spare callousness and violence?

130 Dædalus Spring 2003 Still, recent study has shown how often the teaching of Christian mystics found pictorial expression–as images created either by the mystics themselves or their disciples. Since mysticism is a Bernard McGinn contextual phenomenon embedded in a religious worldview, scholars have also on mysticism observed that art not only can be a way & art for mystics to communicate what they are trying to teach, but that images have also helped shape the minds and imagi- nations of mystics. If the mystic text is an experiment in saying the unsayable, then the mystical image–something far more widespread than once thought– emerges as a fascinating attempt to see the unseeable. Over ½fty years ago, Millard Meiss, in It may seem strange that in the Christian Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black West, mysticism and art have gone hand- Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the in-hand–strange, because the conjunc- Mid-Fourteenth Century (1951), acutely ob- tion is paradoxical. Precisely because it served how images influenced mystical involves a hidden and secret perception accounts, especially in a chapter devoted of God–the root meaning of mystikos– to Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth- the mystical element of religion ought, century Italian mystic. It may now strike by de½nition, to defy pictorial represen- us as no surprise that mystics’ descrip- tation. Mystics have wrestled with lan- tions of encountering God were influ- guage as the necessary, if insuf½cient, enced by the pictorial aspects of their tool of their imperative to invite others culture. What is surprising is that until to experience an otherwise ineffable the past decade or so there has been so God. But why would they need pictures? little scholarship on the nature of this What is inexpressible in words may influence. seem even further removed from any Recently, however, a number of art kind of visualization. historians have begun to explore the rich interchanges between art and mysti- cism. Among these are the late Michael Bernard McGinn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnel- Camille of the University of Chicago, the ley Professor of Historical Theology and the His- Italian Chiara Frugoni, and Thomas tory of Christianity at the Divinity School of the Lentes of the University of Münster, University of Chicago. A Fellow of the American who helped found the only doctoral pro- Academy since 2002, he is currently at work on the gram that gives a joint degree in theolo- fourth volume of his history of Western Christian gy and art history. mysticism, entitled “The Presence of God” No one has done more to explore how (1991–). He is the editor in chief of the “Classics images are a resource for the study of of Western Spirituality” series, which to date has mysticism than Jeffrey Hamburger of published 104 volumes of the major spiritual texts Harvard. From his Yale dissertation pub- of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. lished as The Rothschild Canticles: Art and

Dædalus Spring 2003 131 Note by Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland cir- images of the mystical love affair–some Bernard McGinn ca 1300 (1990), down to his recent St. based on the descriptions found in the John the Divine: The Dei½ed Evangelist in Song, and others that create original Medieval Art and Theology (2002), Ham- iconographic forms, such as the heart as burger’s contributions have shown how a house or dwelling for the Bridegroom. mystical images are more than just illus- Despite some specialized studies of mer- trations for texts, but are integral aspects it, there are no adequate general works of the presentation of mystical teaching. on this important tradition in mystical It is a message that theologians and stu- iconography. dents of religion have unfortunately Perhaps the most surprising chapter in been slow to recognize. the story of mystical art in Christianity Among the most fruitful avenues of re- concerns the role of the Trinity–belief search into the relation between art and in the action of the Father, Son, and Ho- mysticism has been that of devotion to ly Spirit in the inner transformative pro- Christ’s Passion, especially forms of lit- cess. According to Christian belief, the eral imitation of the Passion widespread Son took on human nature and therefore in the late Middle Ages. While not all became visible and capable of being por- Passion images are related to mystical trayed. The defenders of icons success- imitatio passionis, there was a strong link fully argued this case in the great contro- between Passion art and Passion piety versy over the legitimacy of images in between 1200 and 1500 that has opened the eighth and ninth centuries. Further- up new dimensions for the study of how more, the New Testament teaches that devout Christians sought to identify the Holy Spirit also became visible, at with Christ on the cross. Pioneering least in symbolic form, as dove (Mt. work in this vein was done by James H. 3:16) and ½re (Acts 2:3–4). But, as John Marrow (Passion Iconography in Northern 1:18 put it, “No one has ever seen God European Art of the Late Middle Ages and [i.e., the invisible Father].” A fortiori, the Early Renaissance, 1979). In the past de- Trinity qua Trinity is invisible, and be- cade a number of new studies have cast yond all imagining and thinking. further light on how representations of Although Christian theologians and the cruci½ed Christ help us understand mystics as early as Augustine and Grego- aspects of late medieval mysticism. ry of Nyssa at the end of the fourth cen- Another rich ½eld of investigation cen- tury had already begun to analyze how ters on the erotic relation between the the Trinity acts in the depths of the soul soul of the mystic as bride, and Christ as to bring humans to deeper participation the divine Bridegroom. Since the time of in the divine life, they were suspicious of Origen (d. 254 c.e.), the Christian mys- visual representations of the triune God. tics read the Song of Songs as the premier Augustine’s strong sense of divine inef- guide for analyzing the transcendent fability led him to condemn all attempts erotics of the love affair between Christ to portray the Trinity, even with abstract and the soul. In their commentaries, symbols (see Letter, 120). Ambrose of Milan and Gregory of Nyssa But not all Christians agreed with him. among the early Fathers, and Bernard of There is a rich tradition of attempts to Clairvaux and William of Saint Thierry create images of the Trinity, both in in the Middle Ages mined the tropics of Eastern and Western art, as well as a desire found in the Song of Songs. From at continuing debate over what kinds of least the twelfth century, we also ½nd images are acceptable. At least some of

132 Dædalus Spring 2003 these images can be connected, directly sor, contributed to this tradition, and Mysticism or indirectly, to speculation on the role quite possibly to mystical interpreta- & art of the Trinity in mystical transforma- tions of the image. In the twenty-eighth tion. of his Questions to Thalassius, Maximus Attempting to portray the invisible speaks of Abraham as “the true gnostic Trinity present in the soul can be de- [i.e., mystical knower] whose mind had scribed as a limit situation of Christian already transcended matter and material mystical art: something that is impossi- types so that God taught him that the ble, perhaps even forbidden (as Augus- immaterial principle of the Trinity in- tine wished), and yet also imperative for heres in the principle of the Monad. It some. was for this reason that God appeared to Around the year 1420, the Russian him as three but conversed with him as monk Andrei Rublev ‘wrote’ (as icon one.” Someone steeped in this thought painters phrase it) the image of the Trin- could make use of the Trinity icon to be- ity. He depicted the three angels that ap- come like Abraham, that is, to gaze with peared to Abraham at the Oak of Mamre gnostic vision, rather than crude materi- (Gen. 18). This icon, which today hangs alistic sight, through the image in order to in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, is gain deeper union with the invisible the most famous example of a form that Trinity. goes back to the fourth century. Early In the medieval West there are some Christian exegesis of the mysterious fascinating examples of programs of Genesis account had either interpreted Trinitarian representation that can be Abraham’s vision as Christological, that more explicitly tied to mystical texts and is, as an appearance of Christ accompa- practices, such as the Trinity images in nied by two angels, or as a symbol of the the Rothschild Canticles (c. 1300) and Trinity. According to Origen, “that ap- some of the illustrations for the Of½ce of pearance of the angels signi½ed a mys- the Holy Trinity found in the Hours of tery more than angelic, because the mys- Catherine of Cleves (c. 1440). What is par- tery of the Trinity was set forth there” ticularly intriguing about Western Trini- (Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum, tarian art, though, are the cases where 2). Exactly how the three angelic ½gures, we ½nd mystical authors who became whom, according to tradition, Abraham their own iconographers–mystics who ‘adored as one,’ portrayed the Trinity created their own images as a necessary was subject to debate, but this unusual way for presenting their message. iconic form came to be canonized in the For example, Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) Christian East. constructed an elaborate Trinitarian the- While the ‘Hospitality of Abraham’ (as ology of history that included hope for it was called) originated prior to mysti- an imminent ½nal age of communal con- cal speculation on the Trinity and can- templation on earth. The Calabrian ab- not be directly tied to a particular mysti- bot recognized that his often obscure cal system, the icon was used for cen- thought could be best communicated by turies within a religious world where the intricate diagrams he called ½gurae, a consideration of the role of Abraham as number of which present the relation a biblical model for contemplation was between the Trinity and humanity’s richly developed. Signi½cant mystical growing mastery of contemplation. authors, like Gregory of Nyssa and the A century and a half later, Henry Suso sixth-century monk Maximus Confes- (d. 1366) was equally fascinated with a

Dædalus Spring 2003 133 need for using “images to cast out im- ages” in the path to union with God. He commissioned a dozen pictures for the Exemplar, the de½nitive edition of four mystical treatises he produced not long before his death. To illustrate the ½nal Yi-Fu Tuan chapter of his Life of the Servant, Suso created a picture manifesting how the on human soul comes forth from the hidden divine geography abyss through the action of the Trinity and ½nally flows back again through the three persons into the darkness of God. This image not only attempts to visual- ize invisible mysteries, but also provides a synoptic view of the Dominican’s teachings. The revival of mysticism in recent de- cades may appear puzzling to those who see religion as an uncomfortable survi- As it is practiced today, the academic vor in a scienti½c world. Whatever one’s ½eld of geography spans the entire spec- attitude toward the mystical dimension trum of disciplines, from the physical of religion, the study of mysticism has and biological, through the social and revealed a rich tradition of artworks that economic, to the humanistic. It is weak- continue to intrigue us by their paradox- est today, however, at the humanistic ical effort to make the invisible some- end, and I have often thought that my how accessible to our gaze. ½eld might have avoided this fate if we modern geographers had drawn more inspiration from the Humboldt broth- ers–Wilhelm the humanist (1767–1835) and Alexander the explorer and natural scientist (1769–1859). Alexander von

A Fellow of the American Academy since 2002, Yi-Fu Tuan has received honors from the Associa- tion of American Geographers, the National Council for Geographic Education, and the Amer- ican Geographical Society, and was elected a Lau- réat d’Honneur of the International Geographical Congress. He is perhaps best known for his land- mark study of “Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience” (1977), a work that not only estab- lished the discipline of human geography, but also has proved influential in such diverse ½elds as the- atre, literature, anthropology, psychology, and theology.

134 Dædalus Spring 2003 Humboldt of course made lasting contri- aphor enables us to make concrete what Human butions to the ½elds of physical geogra- is diffuse, familiar what is unfamiliar. geography phy and biogeography, adding to our Nature is vast, complex, and threaten- knowledge of plants, animals, and the ing. It seems less so when we can predi- earth. He also added signi½cantly to our cate it on parts of our body, which we knowledge of what I call ‘human geogra- know intimately. So we say: headlands, phy’ through his histories of landscape foothills, mouth of a river, spine of a painting and nature poetry. All he lacked ridge, shoulder of a valley, arm of the as a humanist, so his older brother Wil- sea, and so on. helm said, was “a quiet contentment in Even the objects we manufacture our- himself and in thinking.” A quiet and selves can seem distant and coolly indif- persistent thinking is certainly one ferent. To minimize that possibility, we virtue that I have tried to exemplify in bind artifacts to our anatomy, saying: my own contributions to the ½eld of hu- eye of a needle, spine of a book, hands of man geography. a clock, legs of a table, house as body, I have explored a number of different and body politic. Not just metaphors, topics in the ten books I have published, but the full resources of language are but three themes are recurrent: the felt- available to us as poets–and we are all quality of place, the psychology of pow- poets to some degree–to ½rm up the er, and culture as imagination. emotional bonds between ourselves and One way to approach the felt-quality the world. of place is to do a detailed study of a par- The world is made up of speci½c ob- ticular place in novelistic detail. I chose jects (foothills, tables, etc.), but also of not to follow this path, addressing the more abstract entities such as space and felt-quality instead from the opposite di- spaciousness. How does language cope rection–that is to say, from the universal with spaciousness, making it more real human endowments of synesthesia and and vivid to us? One way is to use the language. Synesthesia is the blending of specialized vocabulary of numbers. For the senses such that, for example, when example, South English Legendary, a popu- one hears a sound one also sees a color. lar medieval work, conveys the vastness (Language points to its synesthetic of space by saying, “If a man could travel grounding when we say, for instance, upwards at the rate of more than 40 “What a loud tie you have” or “It’s bit- miles a day, he still would not have terly cold.”) To synesthesia many ob- reached highest heaven in 8,000 years.” jects owe their particular vividness in But more common is to use a geo- our imaginations. graphical vocabulary that can stimulate Synesthesia is an advantage to young our imagination, as an anonymous Chi- children because it helps them to locate nese poet in the second century b.c. and and ½xate on the world’s objects; when Wordsworth in 1805 do in two poems strongly developed, however, it pro- that bear striking similarities. The Chi- motes hallucination. As children grow nese poet writes, “Who knows when we older and acquire a certain fluency in shall meet again? / The Hu horse leans language, synesthesia weakens, its func- into the north wind; / the Yüeh bird tion to enrich the world being taken over nests in southern branches: / day by day by the metaphorical powers of language. our parting grows more distant.” In De½ned in parallel with synesthesia as Wordsworth’s poem, just how solitary is the blending of images or concepts, met- the Solitary Reaper? How vast is the

Dædalus Spring 2003 135 Note by space that envelops her? For answer, mals, and human beings. An outstanding Yi-Fu Tuan Wordsworth evokes, to one side, example of violently abusing plants for “. . . weary bands / Of travellers in some our entertainment is topiary art. An- shady haunt, / Among Arabian sands,” other is the miniature garden, and bon- and, to the other, “. . . the cuckoo-bird, / sai. Breaking the silence of the seas / Among Is bonsai a ½ne art? What kind of ½ne the farthest Hebrides.” art is it that regularly uses instruments A theme well known to geographers of torture–knives and scalpels, wires long before it was taken up by the envi- and wire cutters, trowels and tweezers, ronmental movement of our time is the jacks and weights–to distort plants and human transformation of the earth. Ever prevent their natural growth? Making since Alexander von Humboldt, geogra- pets of animals is a familiar story. Some- phers have studied how forest and scrub- what less familiar is the way they are land, steppe and swamp, have been made through techniques of selective turned into arable ½elds, towns, and cit- breeding into grotesque and dysfunc- ies. This transformation speaks of eco- tional shapes, purely for human fancy. nomic, political, and technological From a psychological viewpoint, pow- power. er reaches a peak–a peak charged with But largely unconsidered by both ge- sadistic-erotic pleasure–when one can ographers and environmentalists is the turn other people into playthings. exercising of power for pleasure–the Renaissance potentates kept dwarfs, pleasure that is to be had in making gar- whom they dressed up, slobbered over, dens and pets. Geographers, like most passed around at the dinner table, or people, tend to see gardens and pets as presented as gifts to influential friends. belonging to an area of innocence, in Household slaves and servants, if they sharp contrast to large works of engi- were comely, enjoyed the status of pets neering and economic development. Yet, in slave-owning and other strongly hier- isn’t playing with nature and human archical societies. Women were decora- beings–treating them as aesthetic ob- tive objects and sexual toys in the Orien- jects or ‘fun’ things–even more driven tal harem. Even in ‘enlightened’ Western by power, by a power that is not even societies, women were legally children– constrained by economic ends? child-wives in dollhouses–until a centu- Play is not as innocent as we think. I ry or so ago. Today, the temptation to developed that idea in a book called patronize remains and is directed largely Dominance and Affection: The Making of at racial minorities and ‘our little brown Pets (1984). Water, I say, becomes a pet brothers’ in the impoverished and devel- when we make it dance for us. And we oping parts of the world. can only make it dance through the exer- A third theme in my work has been cising of irresistible power–the power culture considered as a product of imagi- of hydraulic engineering and of large la- nation. By imagination I mean the abili- bor teams organized along military lines. ty to see what isn’t there. A carpenter Fountains, which charm our senses, are looks at a wooden plank and sees a blatantly unnatural, and I can just imag- bench; Michelangelo looks at a marble ine future hydrophiles trying to liberate block and sees David. them from their servile state. Animals migrate when they are From water, which is alive only in a pushed. Humans, likewise. But humans ½gurative sense, I move on to plants, ani- also migrate under the lure of a pull–

136 Dædalus Spring 2003 that is, when they envisage a place ‘out and enclosed–varies enormously, de- Human there’–say, the New World–that is pending on a people’s access to great geography more attractive. Or they may decide to works of architecture. Ancient Egyptians stay put in the Old World. The pull, knew the sublimity of exterior space then, is an image or plan in their minds (think of the pyramids under moon- that they try to turn into a three-dimen- light), but interior space for them was sional, material reality. People are never darkness and clutter. Ancient Greeks wholly content with what already exists. had the Parthenon on top of the Acropo- Having moved to the New World, mi- lis to lift their spirit, but its interior was grants may in time grow dissatis½ed, hardly more spacious than the interior imagine a better place further west, pick of an Egyptian mortuary temple. Euro- up stakes and move–and do so again peans had to wait for the construction of and again. Culture as I have character- Hadrian’s Pantheon (118–128 a.d.) to ized it here is potentially progressive. acquire, for the ½rst time, the sense of an From this general standpoint, I raise a interior space that was formally elegant, question that comes naturally to a geog- yet sublime–a vast hemisphere illumi- rapher, namely, What might be the rela- nated by the rotating sun. Architecture tionship between the quality of environ- and, with it, the human appreciation of ment and the quality of life? As swamps interior space continued to evolve. are drained and malaria is conquered, This story of architectural/aesthetic the quality of human life undoubtedly progress leads me to ask, What about improves. Likewise in a built environ- moral rules and systems? All societies ment, as peeling walls are repainted, have moral rules, but only a few have drains are unclogged, and rooms and elaborated them into systems–into household amenities are added. what might be called moral edi½ces. Are But at what point does adding more people who live under such edi½ces– rooms and amenities cease to improve, large, complex, subtle, and in some ways and maybe even detract from, the quali- beautiful–better off, more able to real- ty of life–a life that is not only material- ize fully their potential as moral beings, ly but also intellectually and spiritually than people who live in structures of rewarding? Material things can enslave simpler design–lean-tos, huts, and shel- rather than liberate. But is the same also ters? true of works of art, philosophy, and This is the sort of question that de- religion? serves quiet and persistent thinking– Consider an elemental aesthetic expe- and makes me hopeful that the humanis- rience known to all human beings–that tic spirit of the Humboldt brothers may of interior space. The quality of that ex- yet enrich and expand the ½eld of geog- perience–of what it means to be inside raphy today.

Dædalus Spring 2003 137 President Patricia Meyer Spacks Executive Of½cer Leslie Cohen Berlowitz Vice President Louis W. Cabot Secretary Emilio Bizzi Treasurer Peter S. Lynch Editor Steven Marcus Vice President, Midwest Center Martin Dworkin Vice President, Western Center John R. Hogness

Dædalus Board of Editors Committee Steven Marcus, Chair, Joyce Appleby, Russell Banks, Stanley Hoffmann, Donald Kennedy, Martha C. Nussbaum, Neil J. Smelser, Rosanna Warren, Steven Weinberg; ex of½cio: Patricia Meyer Spacks, Leslie C. Berlowitz

Committee on Publications & Public Relations Guy W. Nichols, Chair, Emilio Bizzi, Joan Bok, Jesse H. Choper, Denis Donoghue, Jerome Kagan, Jerrold Meinwald; ex of½cio: Patricia Meyer Spacks, Steven Marcus, Leslie C. Berlowitz

Inside back cover: This small (14.3 x 9.5 cm) and delicately detailed Psalter Map in the collection of the British Library (Add. ms. 28681) accom- panies a thirteenth-century copy of the Psalms. A mappamundi with the Old Temple at its navel, it is centered on Jerusalem, with Africa to the lower right, Europe to the bottom left, and Asia taking up the top half of the world disk (note the Garden of Eden directly under the ½gure of Christ). We no longer center our- selves in space. Do we do so in time? See D. Graham Burnett on Mapping time: chronometry on top of the world, pages 5–19. Psalter Map re- printed by permission of the British Library.

Dædalus coming up in Dædalus: Dædalus

on secularism Nikki Keddie, Martin E. Marty, James Carroll, Henry Munson, & religion Azzam Tamimi, M. Hakan Yavuz, T. N. Madan, Akeel Bilgrami, Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Vali Nasr, John L. Esposito, Jose Casanova, Heba Raouf Ezzat, Spring 2003 Jean Bethke Elshtain, William Galston, Christopher Hitchens, and others Spring 2003: on time

on science Alan Lightman, Gerald Holton, Susan Haack, David Pingree, on time D. Graham Burnett Mapping time 5 Peter Pesic, Peter Wolynes, and Robert Schimke David S. Landes Clocks & the wealth of nations 20 Michael Rosbash A biological clock 27 on learning Alison Gopnik, Howard Gardner, Jerome Bruner, Susan Carey, Thomas Gold The physics of past & future 37 Elizabeth Spelke, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Povinelli, Clark Peter L. Galison & Glymour, and Michael Tomasello D. Graham Burnett Einstein, Poincaré & modernity 41 Jennifer M. Groh & on happiness Martin E. P. Seligman, Richard A. Easterlin, Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael S. Gazzaniga How the brain keeps time 56 Anna Wierzbicka, Bernard Reginster, Robert H. Frank, Julia E. Danielle S. Allen How the Greeks kept time 62 Annas, Darrin M. McMahon, and Ed Diener Anthony Grafton Dating history 74 J. Hillis Miller Time in literature 86 on progress Joseph Stiglitz, John Gray, Charles Larmore, Randall Kennedy, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jagdish Bhagwati, Richard A. Shweder, and Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson Is time running out? others & Marco Verweij The case of global warming 98 Richard Fenn Time’s up: the apocalyptic imagination 108 on human nature Steven Pinker, Bernard Williams, Lorraine Daston, Jerome Kagan, Vernon Smith, Joyce Appleby, Patrick Bateson, Thomas Sowell, poetry Susan Howe from Bed Hangings ii 113 Jonathan Haidt, Richard Wrangham, Donald Brown, and others ½ction Rick Moody Fish Story 118 plus poetry by Lucie Brock-Broido, Les Murray &c.; ½ction by Lee K. Abbott, Joanna Scott &c.; and notes by Nathan Glazer, Robert notes Bernard McGinn on mysticism & art 131 C. Post, Michael Traynor, Jennifer Hochschild, Perez Zagorin, Yi-Fu Tuan on human geography 134 Gerald Early, Daniel Schorr &c.

U.S. $13/Canada $16 www.amacad.org