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  • Feux et Signaux de Brume: Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse 1
  • Michel Serres (bio)
    Translated by Judith Adler (bio)

Time Passes, Lost Time, Duration

We are told that Virginia Woolf was reading Proust when she was writing To the Lighthouse. Indeed, she entitled the second part of her novel “Time Passes.” To measure the passage of time she needed a clock; she used a house. The way an abandoned country house grows old is something everyone has seen and understands. Little airs pry their way in; water leaks through widening cracks; rats invade; spiders stubbornly weave their webs; dust thickens on floor boards beginning to shrink apart—until that brief moment when the balance is tipped by something as light as a feather, the roof caves in, and the house suddenly collapses. Lovers then seek shelter in its ruins, and campers make their beds among the invading brambles. Just as the faces and hands of old men become wrinkled, so the rooftop and walls of the house come to bear the marks of bad weather and passing weeks, that is, of tempests and time.

Tomorrow we will go to the Lighthouse if the weather is fine. No, we will not, the wind is blowing from the wrong direction. Romance languages employ a single word (temps, tempo, tiempo) for two meanings that English and German distinguish: the first, chaotic, is registered on a barometer, and the second, oscillating, on a chronometer: time and weather, Zeit and Wetter. Aligned in aleatory fashion, the intemperate weather (rains, winds, and snow) of temperate latitudes calculated on the barometer accelerates the work of temporality calculated on the chronometer to the rhythm of winters and springs, months and weeks, and the yellow flashes that sweep windows and walls of the house with light.

Furthermore, all Indo-European languages assimilate two temps, times that the roots of the word, derived from two Greek verbs, distinguish: teino and temno. The first is continuous, a stretching out (at least ten years of absence), the second is discontinuous, intermittent—the flashing of the revolving lamp marks the rhythmic measure, the ten-second beat, let us say, of a process that never ceases, be its tempo fast or slow. [End Page 110]

All the languages that I know softly assimilate three “times,” which hard science, as well as individual, subjective consciousness, differentiate. One, reversible and regular, turns continuously with the lamp of the Lighthouse. But there are also two others: the first—negative, irregular, and irreversible—is visible in erosion and wear, sickness, death and dying; while the other, irreversible as well, but new and positive, shoots forth in Woolf’s story in the form of the eight beautifully growing children.

Finally, both the sciences and life experience know a “time” that the languages in question, at least to my knowledge, seem to ignore: the one that accumulates slowly behind a dike or a threshold, only to overwhelm it in an instant. Wear and tear continue for a very long time until, finally, all protective barriers suddenly give way.

Situated off the coast of Scotland, not far from a port in the Hebrides, close to the sea and battered by semi-constant rain and winds, the universal house-clock marks the superabundant multiplicity of these durations. The precision of Woolf’s text doesn’t miss a single one of them, while Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, being intimist, does not register them with such exactness.

Inanimate Objects, Do You Have a Soul?

Virginia Woolf was reading Proust while writing To the Lighthouse. On a first reading, as I’ve just suggested, the two novelists share a common anxious preoccupation with time, even though they are far from calculating it in the same manner. They also share a common love of painting. But—and this often distinguishes us from our British friends, more mariners than we (who remain incorrigible a-cosmists or apartment intimists…)—there is less weather than time in the work of the Parisian aesthete, hyper-asthmatic and confined indoors, while there is as much sea, sail, rock, wave, and squall as interior duration in the work of the English novelist.

Virginia Woolf entitled Parts 1 and 3 of...

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