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Time’s Passing Catastrophes, Trimalchio, and Melancholy There are two possible ways of viewing the passage of time: that everything is in a state of constant and unrecognizable change. And everything remains unchanged. There it is, the supreme contradiction. Linear time and circular time. Linear time is envisaged as a huge, endless knife-blade scraping its way across the universe . . . Circular time sees the world as remaining more or less the same . . . I believe that virtually all of the existing books on time, deep down, are certain that it is linear. That it passes and is then, irrevocably, gone . . . The life of every person possesses a linear trait . . . And yet, life is full of repetition . . . Read books about the history of time and you will find all of them agree that linear time triumphed along with Christianity . . . Even though linear time has triumphed, it is as though cyclic time is what counts . . . In 1865 Rudolf Clausius suggested the word “entropy” as a scientific term for the fact that time was linear, irrevocable, irreversible . . . Up to that point, even in biology, no one had really been sure of anything other than that living creatures kept on reproducing themselves ; that nature was cyclic. —peter høeg, Borderliners (1994, 201–3) I have used for the epigraph of this chapter a quotation from Peter Høeg’s novel Borderliners (1994, 201–3) because it so neatly embodies popular perceptions of linear and circular time. The primary focus of this chapter will be on time, linear and circular; its relation to the body and to the mind; and how individuals may register their experience particularly of linear time. This will mean that we must reconsider the concepts of circular and linear time. Unfortunately I have found that, among the sorts of readers this book is liable to find, circular time is viewed as, if not an aberration, at least a fiction of overimaginative scholarly minds.1 This should not be the case, as I hope the extract from Høeg’s frightening fiction may demonstrate. There are many devotees of circular time, not the least of whom are children. Høeg’s narrative speculations are useful in another way. They provide a 197 6  striking example of the localization of the apparent triumph of linear time to within the period of the rise of Christianity and then to the century following the Enlightenment. Høeg’s conceptualization mirrors many others. Time, yoked with insanity (so we might consider melancholia), owes its modern formulation to the Enlightenment. (For madness see Foucault 1973. For time see Elias 1992; Borst 1993; Foucault 1977, 149ff.) Foucault argued that madness was incompatible with the new mercantile economy. It was therefore conceptualized and then banished to the new “clinics”: “in the bourgeois world . . . the cardinal sin . . . had been defined . . . [as] . . . inability to participate in the production , circulation, or accumulation of wealth (whether or not through any fault of their own [i.e., of those who are mad]). The exclusion to which they [sc., the mad] were subjected goes hand in hand with that inability to work, and it indicates the appearance in the modern world of a caesura that had not previously existed” (Foucault 1987, 68; see also Foucault 1973; cf. Porter 1987, 6–10). It is easy to see how Foucault and others imagined that time had become reconceptualized under the same forces.2 Time and its articulation within a key period in the ancient world will be the focus of this chapter. I will attempt to demonstrate that time’s passing (as we see it in the literature of the first century of our era) can best be understood as part of a dialogue that engrosses boredom, melancholia, and lovesickness. I hope to demonstrate not just that time exhibits a periodization that runs parallel to that of madness (as I have just indicated, I am using the term madness as an equivalent of melancholia) but that these particularized states also manifest patterns and relations that are shared and that are applicable not only to one another but also to the worldviews that this book has considered. I will also argue that, at least in one case, the experience of time’s passing could be registered in a corporealized fashion. As melancholy could be linked with conditions such as quartan fever (chapter 1), love with fevers and wasting (chapter 2), or boredom with nausea (chapter 3), so could time be linked with intestinal disquietude. Time itself is...

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