Light Traces

15. Visible Time

15 Visible Time 131 Boston October Not many leaves have yet fallen. Most are still green, even if beginning to show fringes of orange and yellow. Yet there are already a few trees that have donned their fall colors, displaying them brilliantly on days that are bright and clear, attesting visibly to the arrival of the season. Though the sun now stays a bit lower in the sky and the character of the light is noticeably different from that of summer, there is still, on bright, clear days, more than ample sunlight to let the blaze of color appear in all its radiance. Though the light itself seems more transparent than ever, the shining of color that its presence releases is unmatched by any other that nature has to offer. With the arrival of these bright, clear autumn days, it is as if the glorious yellows, oranges, and reds had been held in store throughout the summer, as if they had been carefully prepared by nature to announce the advent and then the progress of the new season. Within a couple of weeks 132 LIGHT TR ACES the color will have reached its high point, and only the evergreens will have escaped nature’s brush entirely. Yet by then the leaves will also have begun to fall. To be sure, fall is not immune to dark, rainy days, though in the earlier weeks of the season they typically are far outnumbered by the bright, clear days with their almost silver light. When the days are overcast, the bright colors not only are muted but also seem to withdraw into whatever green is still around, almost as if reenacting in reverse the transition from summer to fall. Or else they appear to recede in favor of the dull brown of the dry, ever-clinging oak leaves, portending the seasonal transition still to come. But for now the spectacle is that of fall as it approaches its peak. The treetops with their still abundant foliage sway in the breeze, their leaves like miniature sails driving the branches to and fro. The breeze is gentle, with as yet only the tiniest hint of the fierce, frigid winds that winter will bring. In the woods the ground vegetation is still fully intact , though only some of the sturdier bushes still retain the full green of summer. Already the ferns, in particular, those most ancient inhabitants of the woodlands, show signs that they will soon don the crisp, beige mantel that sees them through the winter. Thus they–and indeed the spectacle at large–display their light traces of the progression of the season. All serve to render time visible. There is an ancient view of time that regards it as essentially apart from nature, as having its origin, instead, in the human psyche. According to this view, neither past nor future can be except as sustained within the psyche, for the past is what is no longer and the future is what is not yet. Past and future–and hence time as such–can be only 133 VISIBLE TIME insofar as presence is bestowed on them, in the one case by memory, which renders the past present, and in the other case by expectation, which renders the future present. Thus, time originates in and through the operations of memory and expectation, and consequently it has its originary locus in the psyche. Without these psychic operations there would be only the punctual now, the temporal character of which would be dissolved by its severance from past and future. Whatever is displayed as temporal beyond the psyche, for instance, the progression of the day and of the seasons, must, then, according to this view, be regarded as no more than a derivative, secondary temporality projected upon nature. Time itself would have nothing to do with the earth and its display of the abundance and desolation that are brought by the seasons, nor with the sky and its display of the passage of the day and of the alternation of day and night. This view has persisted since late antiquity but has all too seldom been put into question, despite the visible manifestness of time with which nature surrounds us. For in its unfolding, nature bears the past with it, as in the case of the summer green that is still displayed on the leaves that now, in early fall, are fringed with orange and yellow. Conveying its past into the present, nature effects an operation not...