Measuring Time, Making History

Chapter 1. Is Time Historical?

Time, as Sexton’s lines so forcibly remind us, requires metaphor. It flows like a river, accelerates like an engine, flies like a winged chariot, freezes like instant ice, stands still like a heart between beats, or, in Sexton’s words, grows short, and then dims out as death opens his door. Without the metaphors, whether “that Nazi Mama” wiggling her skirts, or the more venerable arrow of time, the fourth dimension would be exceedingly difficult to grasp. Linguists have noted that it is virtually impossible to talk about time without invoking motion (wiggling skirts, engines , chariots, arrows) and spatial content (short, long). A clock face, for instance, provides both motion, the moving hand, and spatial content, the space traversed Chapter 1 Is Time Historical? 3 “Time grows dim. Time that was so long grows short, time, all goggle-eyed, wiggling her skirts, singing her torch song, giving the boys a buzz and a ride, that Nazi Mama with her beer and sauerkraut. Time, old gal of mine, will soon dim out.” Anne Sexton, First stanza of “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open” (1974) by the hand. Even more modern conceptions of time seem to require spatial representation, however nonintuitive , as in, for example, the warping of space– time around black holes. In the post-Einstein world, space–time or the spacetime continuum (the combination of the two concepts, space and time, helps make the point) is most often described as a rubber sheet and the earth, for instance, as a marble whose roll across the rubber sheet slightly puckers the fabric. Again, we have motion and spatial content.1 Time feels like an essential and defining feature of human life, yet, when pressed to define it, we inevitably fall back upon duration, change, and ultimately, the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future. We all have a direct experience of time, or so we think, and yet it is the dimension of our lives about which there is the greatest philosophical and cosmological disagreement. Aristotle cut to the quick in his Physics (Book IV, ch. or part 10): “First, does it belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things that do not exist? Then secondly, what is its nature?” Is time real, in other words, or is it some kind of figment of the human imagination? Is time absolute, as Newton proposed, or relative, as Einstein argued?2 4 I do not pretend to resolve these enduring philosophical or cosmological dilemmas. Instead, I want to explore some of the ways in which time matters or should matter to historians. Like everyone else, historians assume that time exists, yet despite its obvious importance to historical writing—what is history but the account of how things change over time?—writers of history do not often inquire into the meaning of time itself. In the following pages I will ask a series of related questions about time in history. Why is time now again on the agenda, for historians and more generally in Western culture? Do the debates about the nature of time have particular implications for historians? How did Western Christian culture develop its distinctive way of measuring time (BC/AD or BCE/CE) and how does it influence our notion of history ? What is the role of modernity—our most contentious temporal category—in the historical discipline ? Is modernity an experience of temporality or an ideological construction? Are modernity, the discipline of history, and even the notion of history itself a western, and therefore imperialist, impositions? Should we, can we, move beyond the modern within the historical discipline? 5 WHEN TIME BECOMES URGENT Although time is always with us, it becomes a subject of widespread concern only at certain moments. The most striking examples are the millennia in Western history, 1000 and 2000 AD. We still remember the world-wide worries, largely unfounded, about the supposed Y2K bug; because most computers used two digits rather than four for representing years, many feared that the coming of January 1, 2000 would lead to a global computer breakdown. Companies, governments , universities, and individuals paid out billions of dollars preparing for the changeover, which for the most part occurred without incident. The year 1000 was less precise in every way. For many years historians downplayed the once presumed apocalyptic millennialism of the year 1000 as a fantasy of romantic historians like Jules...