![]() ![]() Proust’s reflection on the nature of time is deep and spread over his writing. What does Marcel Proust bring to our understanding of time? Your second choice is In Search of Lost Time. There is nothing screaming in him, no romantic exaggeration, and yet there is an intensity of emotion that reaches deep inside us and seems to capture the essence of what is to be human, and mortal. Horace is the great cantor of time, of the effect of the flight of time upon our deepest emotions. But then there is an intimate and lyrical side of him which is marvellous, because it merges the clarity and concreteness of his visual, colourful, classical style, with a subtle modulation of universal sentiments which are deeply human - above all the soft melancholy of the running away of time. There is an aulic, or courtly, aspect of his poetry, which I dislike, and is related to his official role of poet of the empire. Horace is probably the greatest poet in Latin, and has many sides. I have been carrying this with me since ever, and re-reading it often. A dear friend of my youth, who is not with us anymore, gave me as a gift, long ago, a small book with a choice of Horace’s Odes. What do you value in this poet of ancient Rome? So, in a sense, we are going back to the Aristotelian definition of time.Įach chapter of The Order of Time opens with verses from your first book choice, the Odes of Horace. For instance, time defined in this way does not need to be the same all over the universe. Time defined in this manner does not have all the features that we intuitively and conventionally attribute to time (and that are physically wrong in the vast universe!). Aristotle gave a much more general definition of time, which is that it is simply a way of counting the changing of things. Einstein understood this a century ago, and over the last hundred years it has become increasingly clear that the world is precisely as he deduced. It works well at our scale but fails when velocities are very high or when the gravitational field is strong. The concept of time that Newton used in building mechanics is equally inadequate. “Our common understanding, where the future is fundamentally different from the past is inadequate for understanding the nature at large” That common understanding, where time is unique, the same all over the universe and the future is fundamentally different from the past, is adequate for our daily life, but is inadequate for understanding the nature at large. Each of them demolishes one aspect of our common understanding of time. These are facts that have been discovered and confirmed. ![]() I describe three of them: first, time passes at different speed depending where you are: you age faster up in the mountains than down by the sea second, the notion of the ‘present’ only makes sense in a bubble around us, there is no ‘present’ objectively defined all over the universe third, the distinction between past and future is only statistical and due to our incomplete knowledge of the world. The first are the big surprises from the physics of the last two centuries. What are some of crucial junctions and turning points? It takes us through the insights of Aristotle, Newton and Einstein and others. Your new book, The Order of Time, describes that detour. The precise time of the clocks is something different from the time of our experience.Īfter a long detour, however, I have indeed ended up thinking that Augustine is basically right: what we call ‘time’ in our everyday life, the time of our experience, has something to do with clocks, but much more to do with what happens in our brain and in our emotions. It grew from the surprise learning that physics shows that our common ideas about time do not work well for the real world, as soon as we study it with more precision. My interest in time didn’t start with Augustine. ‘Time’ is the single most used noun in the English language. The richness of the problem of time is precisely that we can start addressing it from all sorts of places. Where is a good place to begin when thinking about the nature of time? In the Confessions, Augustine suggested that time - at least as we experience it - is nothing other than the tension of consciousness itself. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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