But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide — as those who know their Verlaine will note).
We are now ready to tackle Space. We reject without qualms the artificial concept of space-tainted, space-parasited time, the space-time of relativist literature. Anyone, if he likes, may maintain that Space is the outside of Time, or the body of Time, or that Space is suffused with Time and vice versa, or that in some peculiar way Space is merely the waste product of Time, even its corpse, or that in the long, infinitely long, run Time is Space; that sort of gossip may be pleasing, especially when we are young; but no one shall make me believe that the movement of matter (say, a pointer) across a carved-out area of Space (say, a dial) is by nature identical with the ‘passing’ of time. Movement of matter merely spans an extension of some other palpable matter, against which it is measured, but tells us nothing about the actual structure of impalpable Time. Similarly, a graduated tape, even of infinite length, is not Space itself, nor can the most exact odometer represent the road which I see as a black mirror of rain under turning wheels, hear as a sticky rustle, smell as a damp July night in the Alps, and feel as a smooth basis. We, poor Spatians, are better adapted, in our three-dimensional Lacrimaval, to Extension rather than to Duration: our body is capable of greater stretching than volitional recall can boast of. I cannot memorize (though I sought only yesterday to resolve it into mnemonic elements) the number of my new car but I feel the asphalt under my front tires as if they were parts of my body. Yet Space itself (like Time) is nothing I can comprehend: a place where motion occurs. A plasm in which matter — concentrations of Space plasm — is organized and enclosed. We can measure the globules of matter and the distances between them, but Space plasm itself is incomputable.
We measure Time (a second hand trots, or a minute hand jerks, from one painted mark to another) in terms of Space (without knowing the nature of either), but the spanning of Space does not always require Time — or at least does not require more time than the ‘now’ point of the specious present contains in its hollow. The perceptual possession of a unit of space is practically instantaneous when, for example, an expert driver’s eye takes in a highway symbol — the black mouth and neat archivolt within a red triangle (a blend of color and shape recognized in ‘no time,’ when properly seen, as meaning a road tunnel) or something of less immediate importance such as the delightful Venus sign O+, which might be misunderstood as permitting whorelets to thumb rides, but actually tells the worshipper or the sightseer that a church is reflected in the local river. I suggest adding a pilcrow for persons who read while driving.
Space is related to our senses of sight, touch, and muscular effort; Time is vaguely connected with hearing (still, a deaf man would perceive the ‘passage’ of time incomparably better than a blind limbless man would the idea of ‘passage’). ‘Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,’ says John Shade, a modem poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher (‘Martin Gardiner’) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165. Space flutters to the ground, but Time remains between thinker and thumb, when Monsieur Bergson uses his scissors. Space introduces its eggs into the nests of Time: a ‘before’ here, an ‘after’ there — and a speckled clutch of Minkowski’s ‘world-points.’ A stretch of Space is organically easier to measure mentally than a ‘stretch’ of Time. The notion of Space must have been formed before that of Time (Guyau in Whitrow). The indistinguisable inane (Locke) of infinite space is mentally distinguishable (and indeed could not be imagined otherwise) from the ovoid ‘void’ of Time. Space thrives on surds, Time is irreducible to blackboard roots and birdies. The same section of Space may seem more extensive to a fly than to S. Alexander, but a moment to him is not ‘hours to a fly,’ because if that were true flies would know better than wait to get swapped. I cannot imagine Space without Time, but I can very well imagine Time without Space. ‘Space-Time’ — that hideous hybrid whose very hyphen looks phoney. One can be a hater of Space, and a lover of Time.
There are people who can fold a road map. Not this writer.
At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to ‘Relativity.’ It is not sympathetic. What many cosmogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth. The body of the astonished person moving in Space is shortened in the direction of motion and shrinks catastrophically as the velocity nears the speed beyond which, by the fiat of a fishy formula, no speed can be. That is his bad luck, not mine — but I sweep away the business of his clock’s slowing down. Time, which requires the utmost purity of consciousness to be properly apprehended, is the most rational element of life, and my reason feels insulted by those flights of Technology Fiction. One especially grotesque inference, drawn (I think by Engelwein) from Relativity Theory — and destroying it, if drawn correctly — is that the galactonaut and his domestic animals, after touring the speed spas of Space, would return younger than if they had stayed at home all the time. Imagine them filing out of their airark — rather like those ‘Lions,’ juvenilified by romp suits, exuding from one of those huge chartered buses that stop, horribly blinking, in front of a man’s impatient sedan just where the highway wizens to squeeze through the narrows of a mountain village.
Perceived events can be regarded as simultaneous when they belong to the same span of attention; in the same way (insidious simile, unremovable obstacle!) as one can visually possess a unit of space — say, a vermilion ring with a frontal view of a toy car within its white kernel, forbidding the lane into which, however, I turned with a furious coup de volant. I know relativists, hampered by their ‘light signals’ and ‘traveling clocks,’ try to demolish the idea of simultaneity on a cosmic scale, but let us imagine a gigantic hand with its thumb on one star and its minimus on another — will it not be touching both at the same time — or are tactile coincidences even more misleading than visual ones? I think I had better back out of this passage.
Such a drought affected Hippo in the most productive months of Augustine’s bishopric that clepsydras had to be replaced by sandglasses. He defined the Past as what is no longer and the future as what is not yet (actually the future is a fantasm belonging to another category of thought essentially different from that of the Past which, at least, was here a moment ago — where did I put it? Pocket? But the search itself is already ‘past’).
The Past is changeless, intangible, and ‘never-to-be-revisited’ — terms that do not fit this or that section of Space which I see, for instance, as a white villa and its whiter (newer) garage with seven cypresses of unequal height, tall Sunday and short Monday, watching over the private road that loops past scrub oak and briar down to the public one connecting Sorcière with the highway to Mont Roux (still one hundred miles apart).
I shall now proceed to consider the Past as an accumulation of sensa, not as the dissolution of Time implied by immemorial metaphors picturing transition. The ‘passage of time’ is merely a figment of the mind with no objective counterpart, but with easy spatial analogies. It is seen only in rear view, shapes and shades, arollas and larches silently tumbling away: the perpetual disaster of receding time, éboulements, landslides, mountain roads where rocks are always falling and men always working.
We build models of the past and then use them spatiologically to reify and measure Time. Let us
