An original and stimulating examination by Hugh Rayment-Pickard of the theology of time and history drawing from art, literature, philosophy, theology and everyday life.
144 pp. Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, 1995. To purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements
Prologue
Bibliographical Notes
Index
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Review |
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: BEYOND COHERENCE
The world’s biggest jigsaw
In the middest, we look for a fullness of time,
for beginning, middle and end in concord.
(Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending)Reality. . . is a perpetual becoming. It makes or remakes itself,
but it is never something made.
(Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind)Each life is an encylopaedia, a library,
an inventory of objects, a series of styles.
(Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium)Dissonance
(if you’re interested)
leads to discovery.
(William Carlos Williams, Paterson IV)
Christianity has traditionally thought that all the pieces of our experience must ‘fit together’ like the world’s biggest jigsaw. From our point of view life looks like a jumble of bits and pieces, some coherent, some contradictory, some frankly incomprehensible. But that – we are told – is just because we are not very good at metaphysical jigsaws. We see the pieces, not the full picture. If only we could see things correctly, logically and coherently, we would see that everything in life is part of one picture, one truth, and one reality.
Christian doctrine has been modelled on a belief in the Ultimate Coherence of everything in a single cosmic jigsaw. Missing bits, spare bits, misshapen bits are not allowed. Everything must fit perfectly without omissions or extras. A place for everything, everything in its place and everything under control. This, so we are told, is how God wants it to be. He doesn’t like mess or ambiguity. God likes everything to fit together just so.
This is hard for us to understand. How, for example, do opposites like good and evil both find their place in one coherent picture? St Augustine came up with a clever but unconvincing explanation: the ‘evil’ bits of the jigsaw are not real bits of jigsaw at all. If we could look at the puzzle as a whole, we would see that the picture is perfect and that the apparently ill-fitting pieces are just the empty spaces at the edge where the picture finishes. ‘Taken singly, each thing is good; but collectively they are very good’ (Confessions, XIIl, 32). Over the centuries Christian theologians have devised many other ingenious defences of the Ultimate Coherence of everything. Some say we just need faith in coherence. Others say that there is a struggle underway to bring about Ultimate Coherence. Others say that cosmic coherence is like music that can make even dissonant notes sound part of the harmony.
A more radical solution to the problem is to abandon the jigsaw paradigm. Perhaps it is not helpful to think in terms of Ultimate Coherence. Perhaps the true picture of the world includes anomalies, contradictions, gaps and discontinuities. Perhaps the world appears in many and various true pictures. Perhaps ‘noncoherence’ is the truth of things. If this is so, we need not one but a range of theoretical perspectives and a repertoire of theologies. If the truth really is complex, then an excessive concern with coherence would be an unhelpful attitude.
This is not to say that there is no such thing as truth, but it does require us to think of ‘truth’ differently. There is perhaps a more true view of truth than the view that all things must lock together into a single picture. The truth of plurality and excess is arguably a higher truth than the idea of Ultimate Coherence. Life is multifarious, fluid and contradictory and a theology of complexity is simply more faithful to our experience.
The belief in Ultimate Coherence is really just a prejudice in favour of orderliness. There is nothing inherently right about this prejudice. But when a prejudice is held long enough and passionately enough, it can appear like an unshakeable truth. One of the functions of philosophy is to disturb prejudice and show us other ways of thinking.
Let’s forget the jigsaw and imagine that the world is inherently eclectic, like a wide-ranging art gallery. Here we have many pictures, not one. They hang together in a single space, but they are of different styles and emerge from different viewpoints. There is no point in trying to amalgamate them into one giant picture because they do not belong together in that way. To appreciate an art gallery properly we must understand and value difference. That’s what’s interesting and exciting: there is more than one valid ‘take’ on the world. This book is written in the belief that the world is more like an art gallery than a jigsaw, that the truth is indeed plural, and that a complex of theological and other perspectives is required to make sense of life.
The complex of time
. . . May God us keep
From single vision. . .
(William Blake, ‘With Happiness stretch’d across the hills’)The sand of the sea, the drops of rain,
and the days of eternity
who can count them?
(Ecclesiasticus 1:2, NRSV)
Very early in the process of researching this book I realised that the Christian view of time was not a single doctrine but a plait of contesting myths about human destiny. The teaching of Jesus about time does not reduce to an ultimately coherent view. At times Jesus implies that time is fulfilled in the present moment; at others he indicates that the fulfilment of time has yet to come. At times he says that we can work to help bring about the future; at others he says we must simply await the arrival of the kingdom. In the Old Testament there is a range of prophetic, apocalyptic and mystical views about time. And there is a radical, unbridgeable difference between the theology of time in Paul’s letter to the Romans and that offered in the letter to the Ephesians. The French thinker Paul Ricoeur reaches a similar conclusion. Ricoeur argues that what we mean by ‘biblical time’ is an ‘interweaving of temporalities of different qualities’: narrative time, legislative time, prophetic time, the time of wisdom and hymnic time. ‘Biblical time’ is all these different things at once.
It would require a violation of the text – a desecration if you like to hammer all these views into a coherent whole. In order to respect the biblical thinking of time, I would have to respect its multiplicity and non-coherence. The task I set myself was to try to show how multiple, contesting views of time can ‘belong’ together in a way that is more powerful- and more truthful – than a single, to totalising doctrine. The task was not to show how the different views clicked together like jigsaw pieces, or to show how the differences could be reduced to a unified view. Rather, the task was to describe the biblical view of time in terms of internal tensions, differences, contradictions and interactions. I needed to find a way to elaborate what Jorge Louis Borges (in a different context) called ‘the garden of forked paths’: a ‘growing and bewildering network of divergent, convergent and parallel forms of time’. One phrase that came to mind was Paul’s reference to ‘the fullness of time’ – not a fullness of uniformity, but a fullness of multiplicity.
This approach is strange, but not entirely alien, to Christian theology. The doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ have traditionally allowed for some sense of inherent complexity. But this complexity has always been harmonious – like the voices in baroque counterpoint. What I wanted to describe was a less harmonious complexity – the combination not just of different melodies, but different genres of music – different in mood, style and tempo. Together they might form ‘a collection’ or ‘a cluster’, but not a harmonic whole. Considering them together one could speak meaningfully of ‘similarity’ and ‘difference’ but not of ‘coherence’ .
Another metaphor that came to mind was that of the plait: a rope made of many strands. These strands are twisted together but they are all separate. The strands may be of clashing colours, materials and thickness. Each strand may be unwound and used in its own right. Yet there is an additional strength in being bound together. The Christian view of time is something like this: an interlacing of independent threads. And, like a rope, what holds the threads together is friction.
It would be interesting to explore this theology of dissonance and non-coherence on a much broader scale, searching out the abrasions, tensions, fault lines and contradictions that play their part in structuring all aspects of Christian theology. This book, however, will have to restrict itself to the non-coherence within ‘the Christian view of time’.
So the Christian view of time’ is really a complex of views, a matrix of possibilities. We cannot ‘subscribe’ to the Christian view of time as if it were a take-it-or-Ieave-it proposition that required support or refutation. To be within ‘the Christian tradition’ is to be part of a debate or conversation in which many contradictory voices are simultaneously necessary and correct. The person who says ‘the present is everything, just live in the moment’ is as correct as the person who says ‘the future is everything, sacrifice every present moment to achieve it’. The conflict between these views can’t be squared away – and it doesn’t need to be. We simply need to accept the character of the Christian tradition as non-coherence. This tradition is an unbounded, fluid and multi-levelled cultural domain that can no longer prescribe religious life for us, but can only offer symbols, models, practices and possibilities. As such, the tradition cannot lay down the law for us. At best it can only set out some parameters for discussion, showing us options and alternatives. The tradition acts as a resource rather than a precept.
This book is an attempt to explore the resources of the long and varied traditions of Christian thinking on time. In order to uncover the differences and tensions between the separate strands of thinking about time I have drawn upon insights and ideas from the philosophy of history, in particular from so-called ‘narrativist’ philosophy of history. Instead of trying to describe history itself, the narrativists looked at the types of story we tell about the past, and the ways in which these stories are ’emplotted’. Following this approach – developed in various ways by such thinkers as Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Northrop Frye and Hayden White – I have used some narrativist methods in order to discuss time.
I will argue that we know very little about time and that the relevant human question is not what time is, but how it is narrated. So the strands of thinking about time are strands of narrative or types of story. However, these narrative strands are not ‘theories’ about time, but modes of being in time, actual living states of existence. Being in time is something we can feel physically with every breath. The narrative strands of time are living stories. We do not experience time as an idea, but as the visceral happening of life itself. Time is, as Bergson described it, lived duration. But this duration is sculpted and textured into different narrative shapes.
This book offers a schematic classification of four kinds of story about time: Stories of catastrophe, apocalypse, opportunity and prophecy. Each story has its own distinctive structure and mood. Each story creates its own Zeitgestalt, or time-shape. Within each Zeitgestalt time is understood and experienced in a distinctive way. There is, for example, ‘a world of difference’ – indeed ‘a difference of world’ – between a story structured around apocalyptic waiting and a story structured around historical progress. These are incompatible narrative forms. People living out these kinds of stories act in quite different ways and for different reasons. It is not possible to collapse these stories together to produce one structure, one sense of time, and one kind of human activity. Or rather, it is possible – but only as an act of violence. Unfortunately Christian theology has often been responsible for such forced reductions of difference and variety.
This four-fold scheme seemed to me to mark out the main differences in approach that we find in the Bible. But this classification is not dogmatic and I considered alternative schemes before fixing on this one. There are certainly sub-categories within these four genres (some of which I explore) and it could be argued that these constitute separate strands in their own right.
The biblical views of time, however, were not the point of arrival but the point of departure for this exploration. The ways of thinking of time in the Bible seemed to me to be echoed or repeated in our contemporary culture. The strands of thinking about time that make up the ancient Christian plait seemed to reappear in new configurations, with new emphases, in our secular and perhaps post-Christian age. So this book is also an attempt to account for the relevance of Christianity in recent Western culture, to show that allegedly ‘modern’ ways of thinking about time draw upon much earlier patterns of thought. I will argue, for example, that Samuel Beckett repeats (in a different way) the apocalyptic time-view of St Paul; and that our post-modern ideas of ‘real time’ repeat the ancient Greek understanding of ‘opportunity’.
In this way, I would like to challenge the pervasive assumption that modernity must always go hand-in-hand with novelty. Is there another way of being ‘modern’ that does not require incessant innovation? Is it possible now – as it was in the Renaissance – to be modern partly through the reworking of the ideas of the past? Is there a more rooted way of being modern that seeks out continuity with earlier traditions? This would be modernity-with-a backward glance, not modernity versus heritage, but modernity with heritage. The Renaissance poet Francis Petrarch tried to analyse areas of his life by writing an imaginary dialogue between himself and St Augustine. At other times he tussled with Seneca and Virgil. These dialogues seemed as natural to him as talking with his contemporaries. This book will make similar journeys back and forth between earlier traditions and our own thinking of time.
Narrative realism
There isn’t a True account of time; the way you experience the time of your life depends upon the way you choose to live. A treatise about time recommends a way of life.
(Don Cupitt, The Time Being)Time becomes human to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative.
(Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative)Rather than pass the time, we must invite it in.
(Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project)
So the meaning of time is generated within some basic narrative time forms. What we mean by ‘time’ depends how we narrate its passage. Our world of time is a world of story. This begs the question of the truth and falsity, or the realism and the illusion of our narrative thinking of time. If I say that I see time as a romantic struggle to overcome adversity, what makes that story real or true? Are all stories about time true? Can time mean whatever we want it to?
These are natural questions to ask, but answers are not easily found. This is because narratives are not ‘propositions’ about the world that can be verified by making simple checks against experience. Take two people who both fall ill with the same life-threatening condition. The first sees time in tragic terms and the illness is further evidence that life is a succession of disasters. He becomes depressed and awaits the worst. The second sees time in heroic terms and believes the illness is an obstacle to be overcome. The historical facts in both cases are the same, but the meaning of time for these two people is quite different. We can keep checking the stories against the ‘facts’, but it will never be possible to say that one is right and the other wrong. These are interpretations of the meaning of time and there is not very much point in asking whether one is more ‘real’ than the other. Both versions account well enough for the ‘facts’ and as such they are equally ‘true’.
That’s all very well, but at the individual level some interpretations of time feel much more real to us than others. The person who sees time as tragic will really believe this is the truth. And so will the person with an aesthetic or romantic or stoic view of time. We do not think our personal understanding of time is merely as good as all the others. Our personal philosophy of life feels much better, more true and more real than the alternatives. So the view of the world from within our particular time-form is something that we take to be ‘true’ and ‘real’ for us in a fairly absolute way.
So the interesting question to ask is why certain narratives work better for us than others. What is the psychological or cultural attraction of one view over the others? What are the advantages and disadvantages of viewing life in this or that way? What do we sacrifice by choosing one narrative and not another? What are the fundamental issues at stake in our narratives of time?
I will argue that our narratives about time are real to the extent that they address our anxiety about the meaning of time. We are drifting in time. The seconds of life are ticking away. We need to know what this passage of moments means for us. Our stories about time work if they can reassure us that time has a positive meaning. In this sense our thinking of time is redemptive because it saves us from time-anxiety. The different basic time-forms reassure us in very different ways about the meaning of time. What they all have in common is that they are all real to the extent that they function as redemption histories. In examining a range of basic time forms this book will explore the ‘redemptive power’ in each mode of thinking about time. This will involve asking how far each time-form can assuage our fear of time, and to what extent our fears remain unresolved.
This is the realism that counts: pragmatic realism. ‘Real’ narratives are those that ‘work’ for us by addressing our fundamental concern with time’s meaning. Unreal narratives are those that fail to connect with our underlying anxiety about time or merely cover it over with a cosmetic veneer.
Narrative shapes
History is made while the story is being told;
it is made in being related.
(Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship)Time is like a river made up
of the events which happen,
and its current is strong;
no sooner does anything appear than it is swept away,
and another comes in its place,
and will be swept away too.
(Marcus Aurelius Meditations)The human mind wrote history, and this must read it.
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘History’, Essays)
It could be argued that the most basic distinction to make in a book on time is the difference between linear and circular time. Popular though it is, this distinction is fairly limited. Circular models of time tend to contain a linear component. The so-called ‘cycle’ of the seasons, for example, can also be thought of as a repeating line from Spring to Winter. Similarly, linear models of time tend to contain a circular component. So salvation history, often simply called ‘linear’, may also be understood as a circular return to a lost state of innocence: Heaven the second Eden, Christ the second Adam, Mary the second Eve. The linear arrow of redemption combines with a circular repetition of ‘types’. To call salvation history ‘linear’ tells us something, but by no means everything.
We see the same difficulty with many of the ‘classic’ theories of history. Karl Marx’s revolutionary philosophy of history contains both linear and circular motifs. History moves forward in a line by repeatedly making and destroying epochs (or ‘modes of production’). But at the end of the line, history returns full circle to a state of communism first destroyed by the division of labour and the creation of capital. Nietzsche, by contrast, rejects linear history in favour of a circular doctrine of Eternal Return. But a closer look at Nietzsche’s writing reveals a linear ‘genealogy’ of ideas which points towards the ‘higher history’ of the overman. This is not the place to do it, but similar comments could be made about Vico, Toynbee, Spengler and other proponents of ‘circular’ history.
So I will not be using the linear/circular distinction as a major analytical tool in this book. By contrast, the shapes that interested me were lines and dots, where dots are ‘events’ and the lines are the strings of narrative or explanation that connect them up. When we try to understand time from the human point of view, we are generally trying to place the dots into some kind of pattern or sequence. We join them with ‘story-lines’ that show how the dots relate to one another. Are all the dots on an ascending line heading in some direction? Are they all piling up in a purposeful way? Or are the dots a random splatter, like Rorschach ink blots, scattered here and there without pattern or reason? Or is each dot meaningful in its own right, like the circles on a Damien Hirst spot painting: free-standing events or epiphanies that have their own inherent value? Or perhaps the dots are just an ellipsis in time dot-dot-dot – a line of events marking time before some future revelation? And how do the events of history, or the events that make up our lives, relate to the ‘Big Dot’, the event that Christians call the end-time or eschaton? Such are the questions that are thrown up by thinking of time in terms of dots and lines.
I believe that this is the kernel of the human question of time: what does this event in time mean? What lines are connecting this dot with other events in my life or my world? What is the significance of this very dot happening now? Is it a moment of waiting? If so, for what? Is it an episode of work? If so, to what end? Or is this just a beautiful event in itself, something small and perfectly formed, that requires no further explanation? In short, ‘what is “now” for?’ That’s the human problem of time in a nutshell.
In one sense, you don’t need a book like this to answer this question, because in all likelihood you will already have a very strong belief about what the events of your life are for. However, it is possible that you have not fully understood your own belief system. You will be operating with some implicit philosophy of time, because it’s impossible not to have one. The way you live right now, and your reason for that way of life, are an answer to the question of the meaning of time. But what are you saying about time? What sense if any do you make of the dots of your life? Could you put into words what you think time means, or are you just living it? What do the events of life mean? This book may help to answer that question.
Bibliographical notes : Introduction
At the top of this chapter I quote from two authors who have had a great influence on me: Italo Calvino and Frank Kermode. Calvino’s fiction is deliciously playful and witty. The first thing I read by him is still my favourite: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Vintage, 1992) – a novel that keeps starting but never properly gets going. Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage, 1996) is thought-provoking and I took some ideas from the final essay on ‘multiplicity’. Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (OUP, 1968) is a classic study of literature and eschatology, with many wonderful reflections on time. Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy (Harvard University Press, 1979) is the most inspiring book I have ever read on biblical interpretation.
St Augustine’s argument that all apparent flaws in creation are the ‘privation’ of God’s beauty and goodness can be found in City of God (CUP, 1998) Book VII, chapters 1-8. In Book XIII of Confessions (tr. Maria Boulding, Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), Augustine affirms at length the coherence and goodness of every created thing.
Paul Ricoeur is best read through his essays. His 3-volume Time and Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 1990) is far too long and should be read very selectively. History and Truth (Northwestern, 1965) is a collection of interesting early essays. Figuring The Sacred (Fortress Press, 1995) contains an essay on ‘Biblical Time’, along with many other theological pieces.
James Barr’s Biblical Words for Time (SCM Press, 1962) is really a book about biblical interpretation, but contains many useful observations about the biblical lexicon for time and how lexical analysis should be used. Other useful texts are: Henri Yaker, ‘Time in the Biblical and Greek Worlds’ in Yaker et al, The Future of Time (Anchor Books, 1972) and J. F. Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1948).
Here is a selection of Christian books on the theology of time: J. Marsh, The Fulness of Time (Nisbet, 1952); John Robinson, In the End God (James Clarke & Co, 1950); Oscar Cullman, Christ and Time (Westminster Press, 1949); Paul Fiddes, The Promised End (Blackwell, 2000); William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship with Time (Crossway, 2001); Craig C. Hill, In God’s Time, (Eerdmans, 2002).
Hayden White is the clearest and most interesting of the narrativist philosophers of history. If you can’t face White’s 450-page Metahistory (Johns Hopkins, 1973) help is at hand in a 30-page essay that summarises his argument: ‘Interpretation in History’ in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Johns Hopkins, 1978). Northrop Frye writes about narrativism from a Christian perspective: see The Great Code (Harvest, 1981), The Double Vision (University of Toronto Press, 1991) and The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 2000) in which he sets out a four-fold narrative classification.
Index: other quoted mterial
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Tor Books, 1988) Adorno, Theodor, ‘Progress’ in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Ethics,History (University of Chicago Press. 1989)
Altizer, Thomas, Genesis and Apocalypse (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990)
Amis, Martin, ‘The Time Disease’ in Einstein’s Monsters (Penguin, 1988)
Amis, Martin, Time’s Arrow (Vintage, 2003)
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (OUr, 2002)
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage, 1996)
Auden, W. H., For the Time Being (Faber and Faber, 1945)
Auden, W. H., ‘Time is our choice of How to love and Why’ in For the Time Being.
Ballard, J. G., Crash (Vintage, 1995)
Baudelaire, Charles, Intimate Journals (Penguin Books, 1995)
Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Objects, Images and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Illusion’ in Art and Artefact (Sage, 1997)
Beckett, Samuel, The Shorter Plays: With Revised Texts for Footfalls, Come and Go, and What Where (Faber and Faber, 1999)
Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999)
Benjamin, Walter, Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 2002)
Bergson, Henri, The Creative Mind (Citadel Press, 2002)
Blake, William, ‘The Rose’ and ‘With Happiness stretch’d across the hills’ in Collected Poems (Routledge Classics, 2002)
Borges, Jorge Louis, ‘The Garden of Forked Paths’ in Collected Fictions (Penguin
Modern Classics, 1999) Brecht, Bertolt, ‘In the Dark Times’ in Poems 1913-1956 (Methuen, 2000) Burns, Robert, ‘Open the Door to me, Oh’ in Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Bums (Geddes & Grosset, 2002) Cartier-Bresson, Henri, The Decisive Moment (Simon and Schuster, 1952) Chesterton, G. K., in The Collected Works of G K Chesterton (Ignatius Press, 2001)
Cicero cited in Phillip Sipora and James Baumlin (eds), Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis (State University of New York Press,
2002) Conrad, Joseph, Nostromo (Penguin Books, 1994)
Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent (Penguin, 2000)
Cullmann, Oscar, Christ and Time (Gordon Press Publishers, 1977)
Cupitt, Don, The Time Being (SCM Press, 1992)
Derrida, Jacques, Given Time (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
Derrida, Jacques, Politics of Friendship (Verso Books, 1997)
Duffy, Carol Ann, Mean Time (Anvil Press Poetry, 1998)
Ecclestone, Alan, A Staircase to Silence (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977)
Eco, Umberto, ‘Times’ in Kristen Lippencott (ed.), The Story of Time (Merrell
Holberton, 2000)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Essays (Phoenix, 1995)
Faulkner, William, Requiem for a Nun (Chatto and Windus, 1975)
Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity (Prometheus Books UK, 1989) Fox, Matthew, Original Blessing (Bear & Company, 1996)
Fromm, Erich, To Have or To Be (Abacus, 1987)
Frye, Northrop, The Double Vision (University of Toronto Press, 1991)
Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (W. W. Norton, 1995)
Genet, Jean, Miracle of the Rose (Penguin, 1971)
Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History (Peter Smith Publishing, 1976)
Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Nature (OUP, 1970)
Heidegger, Martin, ‘On the Experience of Thinking’ in Poetry, Language, Thought (HarperCollins, 1975)
Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press, 1987)
Herder, J. F., Yet Another Philosophy of History (1774) in Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language and History (Fortress Press, 1993). Also excerpted in Burns and Rayment-Pickard (eds), Philosophies of History (Blackwell, 2000)
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ‘Pied Beauty’ in Major Poems (Everyman Edition, Dent, 1979)
Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, The Dialectic of Enlightenment
(Stanford University Press, 2002)
Hughes, Ted, Crow (Faber and Faber, 1999)
Hugo, Victor, L’Autographe (cited by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project,
Harvard University Press, 2002)
Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (Flamingo, 1994)
Jaspers, Karl, Tragedy is not Enough (Shoe String Press, 1969)
Kant, Immanuel, Berlin Monthly see Burns and Rayment-Pickard (eds), Philosophies of History (Blackwell, 2000)
Kierkegaard, Soren, Journals (Harper & Row, 1959)
Lang, Fritz, Metropolis (Faber and Faber, 1990)
Lawrence, D. H., ‘The Optimist’ in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Wordsworth Editions, 1994)
Lotze, H., ‘Of Time’ in Metaphysics, 1887. (Can be found in chapter 13 of M. Sherover (ed.), The Human Experience of Time (Northwestern University Press, 2001)
Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain (Vintage, 1996)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Orion, 2003)
McTaggart, J. M. E., The Nature of Existence (Native American Book Distributors, 1968)
Marx, Karl, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (OUP, 2000)
Maxwell, Glyn, Time’s Fool (Picador, 2001)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 1992)
Merton, Thomas, Contemplative Prayer (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983)
Milton, John, ‘On His Blindness’ in The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1999)
Nash, Thomas, ‘Song in Time of Pestilence’ in Works (Blackwell, 1958)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science (Random House, 1974)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power (Random House USA, 1968)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prometheus Books UK, 1993)
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin, 1998)
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford World Classics, 1998)
Piaget, Jean, Principles of Genetic Epistemology (Routledge, 1977)
Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing (Blackwell, 1997)
Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Raven’ in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe (Penguin Classics, 1982)
Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time (Penguin, 2003)
Pullman, Philip, His Dark Materials (Scholastic, 2001)
Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity’s Rainbow (Vintage, 1995)
Ranke, Leopold von Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494-1514, reproduced in Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History. From Voltaire to the Present (Random House, 1972)
Reichenbach, Hans, The Direction of Time (University of California Press, 1991)
Sontag, Susan, On Photography (Penguin Books, 2002)
Spencer, Herbert, Social Statics (Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1995)
Swift, Graham, Waterland (Picador, 1992)
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Tillich, Paul, The Eternal Now (SCM Press, 2003)
Tolle, Eckhart, The Power of Now (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001)
Tolstoy, 1., remark to N. Gusev. For details and further discussion of Tolstoy’s
view of history see Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ which is collected with other essays in The Proper Study of Mankind (Chatto & Windus, 1977)
Vattimo, Gianni, The End of Modernity (Polity Press, 1991)
Vaughan, Henry, ‘Content’ in The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 1995) Vaughan, Henry, ‘The Evening Watch’ in The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 1995)
Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse 5 (Vintage, 2003)
Walker, Henry, ‘Christian Work and Workers’ in East London: Sketches of
Christian Work and Workers (P. Marean, 1984)
Williams, William Carlos, Paterson IV (Penguin Books, 1990)
Woolf, Virginia, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings (Pimlico, 2002)
Yeats, W. B.t ‘The Second Coming’ in Collected Poems (Picador, 1990)
Zizioulas, John, Being as Communion (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985)
