Heroes Not Zombies

When in France I enjoy picking up a magazine or two in the local newsagents. You just get a different kind of magazine in France from what is available in Scotland. One I like is “Philosophie”

You’ll see I read it with my huge Francais-Anglais Dictionnaire to hand!
This issue has an interesting lead feature about the passage of time. Referring to philosophers past and present they consider time from three “dimensions” (with the seasonal focus being on how we experience the passage of time while we are on holiday).
They discuss “le temps de la nature”, “le temps de la conscience” and “le temps collectif”.
The first is Nature’s time dimension, which is, of course, immense compared to the short period of time experienced in a single human life. They point out that we “temporalise” Nature’s time by our use of clocks, watches and other “timepieces” to “measure” time, but this, actually, is just a human invention. Time is not measurable. Our particular units of measurement are culturally determined. They are what they are just because we’ve agreed to use them. Nature knows nothing of minutes and hours. Holidays allow us to step out of these culturally determined rhythms – the nine to five of working life for example – and get in touch with a different experience of the passage of time, related to the weather, to the cycles of the moon, the growth, blossoming and seeding of the plants around us, to the presence of certain birdsongs as migrating birds move through the part of the world where we are.
The second is time as we experience it subjectively, with our eyes closed. As we drift on the pool, or under the bright sun, the past, the present and the future all intermingle in our consciousness. It’s in our own heads where we can experience time not as a simple line passing before us in single file. We can hold the past and the future together in our minds in the same instant as the present. Contemplative practice allows us to disengage from the world for a while and step out of the constant flow of time to see things from quite other perspectives.
The third dimension to consider is shared time, social, societal time. In this issue, the authors consider this from the perspective of collective rituals, festivals, celebrations and routines. In France, for example, the first weekend of August is known as “Le Grand Depart” – the great departure – because most people start their holidays that weekend. In Scotland the cities have their own version of that. Today, in fact, is the start of the “Glasgow Fair”, otherwise known as “Fair Fortnight”, when, traditionally, all the industries would close down for two weeks and the workers would have their annual holiday. Despite de-industrialisation, the “Glasgow Fair” continues. Today is a Glasgow Public Holiday. Last monday was “Bastille Day” in France and there was a Public Holiday, dances, parties and fireworks. (here’s the mobile phone video I took of the fireworks at Carcassonne Castle last year!) These societal and communal rituals and celebrations mark the passage of time in a uniquely shared way.

So, there you have it. Three ways to think about the passage of time. Think I’ll go and have a lie down!