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“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble – to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consumer nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”

— Philip Connors

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Be Like the Past

You can’t just hate the present and long for the past, any more than you can make the future better by demanding of some nonexistent authority that they make it so. To make the future, you have to actually learn about the past, its glories and its follies alike, its conflicts and its contradictions. If we want to be like our forebears who successfully made it new, we have to, you know, be like them. We have to mine the incredibly rich resource of our past, and use that resource in whatever way we need to create new forms of art and politics, forms that are relevant to us. And then we have to hope that the future will treat us the same way, because then it will be alive. 

~Noah Millman, quoted by Alan Jacobs here

See also Josh Gibbs constant refrain: We learn history so that we can repeat it.

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A Temporal Home Base

To care only for things temporal is to lose the things eternal; but to attend rightly to things eternal is the royal road to constructive thought and action in the temporal realm. The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension and release, an increase and then decrease of pressure. In the latter phase they withdraw, by whatever means available to them, to their attentional cottage for refreshment and clarification — and then they can return to the pressures of the moment more effectively, and in ways non-destructive to them and to others. But most of us, I think, get the rhythm wrong: we spend the great majority of our time in systolic mode — contracted, tensed — and only rarely enter the relaxed diastolic phase. Or, to change the metaphor: We think we should be living in the chaotic, cacophanous megalopolis and retreat to our cottage only in desperate circumstances. But the reverse is true: our attention cottage should be our home, our secure base, the place from which we set out on our adventures in contemporaneity and to which we always make our nostos.

~Alan Jacobs

I've been thinking recently about two themes that are present in this post: social media and leisure. Both, I think, I'll address in separate essays later this summer.

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The Old Fortress of Arles

When Charlemagne was dead and Christendom almost extinguished the barbarian and the Saracen alternately built, and broke against, a keep that still stands and that is still so strong that one might still defend it. It is unlit. It is a dungeon; a ponderous menace above the main street of the city, blind and enormous. It is the very time it comes from.

Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea

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I was refreshed, as though by the resurrection of something loved and thought dead. I was no longer afraid of Time.

Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea

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A realm that embraces all times

The most [powerful] works of art, though they are the products of their time, transport us from our own time not only to theirs, but to a realm that embraces all times. We call Shakespeare timeless, but what we mean is that he is not shackled to the particular age from whence he arose—though he could have arisen in no other age but that one.

~Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

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Taipa - Optimum Time Performance

The word kosupa, an abbreviated form of “cost performance” meaning “value for money,” has become a standard part of the Japanese language. Dictionary publisher Sanseidō chose a variation on this theme, taipa, or “time performance,” as its word of the year for 2022. Taipa is used for talking about efficient use of time, and is particularly associated with the members of Generation Z, born roughly between 1995 and 2010. In search of optimum “time performance,” they might watch films and drama at double speed or via recut versions that only show major plot points, and skip to the catchy parts of songs. For these zoomers, learning to make the best use of their time is the only way to save themselves from drowning in an ocean of online content and to keep up with friends’ conversations.

Source

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I'd like to interact with this more, but I don't have *time* right now. Perhaps, when I do it later, it will be like I've already done it in this moment. Heh.

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TV Time

Its various genres are often defined by their temporal boundaries: the half-hour sitcom, the hour-long drama, the limited miniseries, the live broadcast. They’re defined by the hour they’re designed to air: daytime, prime time, late night. More dramatically than even the theater or the Victorian serial, and just as much as radio drama, the most instantly recognizable modes of TV, even today, were shaped in their infancy by the simple question of how much time is available to show them, when, and over how long a period…. And that’s only thinking about questions of length and duration. These forms also evolved historically in relation to time slots, commercial breaks, or even seasons of the year. Its various genres are often defined by their temporal boundaries: the half-hour sitcom, the hour-long drama, the limited miniseries, the live broadcast. They’re defined by the hour they’re designed to air: daytime, prime time, late night. More dramatically than even the theater or the Victorian serial, and just as much as radio drama, the most instantly recognizable modes of TV, even today, were shaped in their infancy by the simple question of how much time is available to show them, when, and over how long a period…. And that’s only thinking about questions of length and duration. These forms also evolved historically in relation to time slots, commercial breaks, or even seasons of the year. ~Philip Maciak (quote via Austin Kleon)

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Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

~Charles Lamb

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For the moment

Schopenhauer has said that the reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment. Life holds no future for them, and consequently no care; if they are content, their contentment is absolute; and our jaded and wearied spirits find a natural relief in the sight of creatures whose little cups of happiness can so easily be filled to the brim. Walt Whitman expresses the same thought more coarsely when he acknowledges that he loves the society of animals because they do not sweat and whine over their condition, nor lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, nor sicken him with discussions of their duty. In truth, that admirable counsel of Sydney Smith’s, “Take short views of life,” can be obeyed only by the brutes; for the thought that travels even to the morrow is long enough to destroy our peace of mind, inasmuch as we know not what the morrow may bring forth.

~Agnes Repplier, "Agrippina"

I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular--shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?--but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

~Annie Dillard, "Living Like Weasels"

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Thanks for Racing Against Time Poster - Charles Goslin

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Creatures that have neither clocks nor books are alive to all manner of knowledge about time and the weather; and about direction, too, as we know from their extraordinary migratory and homing journeys. The changes in the warmth and dampness of the soil, the falling of the sunlight patches, the altering movement of the beans in the light wind, the direction and strength of the air currents along the ground—all of these were perceived by the rabbit awake.

Richard Adams, Watership Down

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The book is awash in nostalgia, but the mottos less so. Most are bracing and hawkish. “This Dial Says Die”, for instance, makes the reader sit up straight, as does “Either Learn or Go”. Others deliver solid, if terse, advice, for example: “Do Today’s Work Today” and “Learn to Value Your Time”.

A few are inscrutable, at least to this reader. “The Time Thou Killest Will in Time Kill Thee” might be a reference to harmful leisure habits, or it could darkly refer to all time, wherein time passed while living equals time killed. I was perplexed by “Opportunity has Locks in Front and is Bald Behind”, until my editors pointed out that the aphorism condenses a longer proverb, about Opportunity’s distinctive hairstyle. (“Opportunity has hair in front, behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but, if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again.”) Sundial advice is usually dispensed as generic wisdom, but occasionally the speaker reveals himself. One patriarch used his sundial to wag a finger at his progeny: “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark which Thy Father Hath Set Up.”

The eeriest sundial inscriptions are written in the first person, as if the sundial is ventriloquizing time itself. What sorts of things does time say? Mostly ominous, haunting things, what one might expect from a hooded ghost with a scythe, not a sundial in an English country garden: “Look Upon Me. Though Silent, I Speak. For the Happy and the Sad, I Mark the House Alike. I Warn as I Move. I Steal Upon You. I Wait for None.” And also, stop looking at this sundial and get on with your life: “Begone About Your Business.”