Ecclesiastes is a profoundly modern book. The author considers that the reality and presence of God are far from obvious in this quite human world. Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23, lays out the central theme of this remarkable book: Everything is vanity in this world, and taking pleasure in all of life, labor as well as leisure, is to accept one of God’s greatest gifts to human beings. Interpreters remain divided on whether such a view constitutes pessimism, realism or a courageous blending of the two.
“Vanity of vanities” (hevel havalim) is the traditional translation, but other translations attempt to capture the force of the expression (e.g., NIV’s “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher, ‘Utterly meaningless!’” and the New Century Translation’s “Useless! Useless! Completely useless!” Does the phrase describe the profoundly ephemeral nature of human existence sub specie aeternitatis (that is, “under the form of eternity,” and hence, simply states a fact), or does it denote a more negative view of the futility of all human striving, which leaves as little impact, ultimately, as the passing breeze (“a chasing after wind,” 1:14)? The answer depends not on one’s translation of the phrase but on one’s interpretation of the book. What makes objects or actions described as havel bad is less their positive malevolence and more their evanescent, unsubstantial, and illusory nature. Thus, when Jeremiah speaks of idols as havel (10:15), he means not that they are capable of positive evil, which they are not, but rather that they are “worthless” or even “worse than worthless” because their devotees have imbued them with a power they do not have. Similarly, when Proverbs 21:6 describes wealth gained through deceit as havel-niddaph, “a fleeting vapor,” it is not that evil inheres in the wealth itself, but rather that the security illicit wealth provides is illusory and will eventually lead to ruin in the eventual course of justice.
I think of Ecclesiastes when I read Marcel Proust (1871-1922). He wrestles with how human beings live their time. He especially considers how human beings experience their time as lost and how they might regain it. Three philosophers, Maurice Merleau-ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor, have helped me consider the significance of the work of Proust as modern people wrestle with their secular experience of time.
Proust wrote À la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things Past, now translated as In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) in seven volumes. I read it because it was on the list of books that I should read sometime in my life. In an old collection of all seven books, it runs 2200 pages plus. One can read the Wikipedia article for background on him and a different article for a summary of this book.
In the title, temps perdu has the double meaning of wasted time and time irretrievably lost, beyond recall, in which we pass as if we had never been.[1]
An effective way to read the complete set of seven books is to read the first and last carefully. The reason is that the last book contains a revelation that will change the way one understands a story that slowly unwinds in segments.
One of the issues scholars face is the nature of the “I” we find in this long book. Scholars wrestle with how much of the narrator is Marcel Proust and how much is fiction. In the context of this novel, it seems appropriate to approach the narrative “I” as fictional, regardless of its connection with the historical Proust. Thus, one reading hypothesis is that the narrator-hero is a fictive entity supporting the tale about time that is this novel.[2]
One might also adopt the reading hypothesis that the long novel is in the form of an ellipse, one focus being the search and the second the visitation. The tale about time is the tale that creates the relation between these two foci of the novel. The character of the novel arises out of the apprenticeship to signs (defined by Gilles Deleuze as signs of the social world, signs of life, signs of sensuous impressions, and signs of art) and to the irruption of involuntary memories. It represents the form of interminable wandering, interrupted by the sudden illumination that retrospectively transforms the entire narrative in the invisible history of a vocation. Time becomes something that is at stake again as soon as it is a question of making the inordinately long apprenticeship to signs correspond to the suddenness of a belatedly recounted visitation, which retrospectively characterizes the entire quest as lost time.[3]
Some scholars think that the narrative is not primary. Rather, Proust has developed a philosophy of time, rooted in Schelling and Schopenhauer, but through the perspective of his teachers, Seailles, Darlu, and Tarde. This would mean that in contrast to the notion of a narrative rooted in the life of Proust to a narrative rooted in the thought of Proust.[4]
The hero of this book is Time. What is it “to be”? His answer is not a succession of chronological time, but the past as it erupts into our present. In a sense, he applies the new physics, the notion in quantum theory that observation changes the thing observed, to the writing of a novel. He has placed the theory of relativity into the form of a novel. Time is not the smooth flow of discrete events, but an ever-changing continuum. Memory is not under our control. Small events can reawaken a stream of memories and almost forgotten experiences. Reality becomes elusive and therefore sad, evanescent, and puzzling. Time turns upon itself. Our only reality is the aspect of things remembered. Yet, Proust also shows the decline of the middle-class French society in the period before WWI. He analyzes the frustrating nature of love, and particularly homosexual love.[5] Proust has made his primary subject the exploration of the personality as the interpenetration of its past and present self-awareness defines it.[6]
Thus, this work is a tale about time, since in it, the very experience of time is at stake in its structural transformations. Further, it explores uncharted modes of dissonant harmony, which affects the narrative composition, but more importantly, the lived experience of the characters in the narrative. Such varieties of temporal experience only fiction can explore, doing so in a way that that refigures ordinary temporality. Finally, it explores the relation of time to eternity and between eternity and death.[7]
Proust has a painstaking way of seeking to reveal the mystery of the world and of reason. He has attentiveness and wonder, demand for awareness, the will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being.[8] Proust rejects the Aristotelian priority of plot over character. The plot attempts to embody the ordinary processes of life. In so doing, it depends on the characters and the development of their relationships.[9] The chronological order is primary.[10] He engages in intense introspection, a quality he shares with many novelists who have moved in the direction of the subjective and psychological. However, along the way, he reveals the external world of the Third Republic.
In the opening of Swann’s Way, Proust refers to awakening from sleep, his mind struggling in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where he was. His body was still too heavy with sleep to move. Yet, his body would try to construe the form that its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members. His body tried to induce a piecing together and giving a name. Its memory of ribs, knees, and shoulders offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another time of sleep. The unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. His body loyally preserved from the past an impression that his mind should never have forgotten, brought before his eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass. It called to mind the home of his great-aunt, in distant days, at the moment of waking, that seemed present without being clearly defined. Proust shows that the part played by the body in memory is comprehensible only if memory is an effort to reopen time based on the implications contained in the present. The body is our permanent means of taking up attitudes, and thus constructing pseudo-presents as the medium of our communication with as well as with space. The function of the body in remembering is that of projection. The body arrays the former attitude into the panorama of the past, projecting an intention to move into actual movement, because the body is a power of natural expression.[11]
The first volume is an account of time lost. Experiences of childhood seem lost. The overture seems lost. Swann in love constructs a narrative of love gnawed away by illusion, suspicion, and disappointment. Love passes through the anguish of expectation, the bite of jealousy, and the sorrow accompanying its decline, and the indifference that meets it death. If one were to stop reading here, lost time would be the paradoxical seeking in reality for pictures stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The novel would have limited itself to a hopeless struggle to combat the ever-increasing gap that generates forgetfulness.[12]
By communicating with the world, we communicate with ourselves. We hold time in its entirety. We are present to ourselves because we are present to the world. In addition, consciousness takes root in being and time by taking up a situation. Consciousness is indivisible power and distinct manifestation. Consciousness is temporalization, that is, a self-anticipatory movement, a flow that never leaves itself. Novelists might see consciousness as a multiplicity of psychic facts among which they try to establish causal relations. For example, Proust shows how the love of Swann for Odette causes the jealousy that modifies his love. Swann, always anxious to win her from any rival has no time to look at Odette truly. The consciousness of Swann is not a lifeless setting in which psychic facts are produced from outside. What we have is not jealousy aroused by love and exerting its own counter-influence, but a certain way of loving in which the whole destiny of that love one can discern at a glance. Swann has a liking for the person of Odette. Swann has a liking for the spectacle that she is, for her way of looking, of modulating her voice, and for the way a smile comes to her lips. For Proust, to have a liking for someone is the feeling of being shut out of the life of the beloved, and of wanting to force one’s way in and take complete possession of it. The love Swann has does not cause him to feel jealously. His love is already jealousy. It had been so from the start. The feeling of pleasure Swann had in looking at Odette bore its degeneration within itself, since it was the pleasure of being the only one to do so. The set of psychic facts and casual relationships merely translates in an external fashion a certain view that Swann takes of Odette, a certain way of belonging to another. The jealous love of Swann has a relation to the rest of his behavior, in which case it might well appear as itself a manifestation of an even more general existential structure, which would be his personality.[13] Proust will show that repression consists in the entering of the subject upon a certain curse of action, such as a love affair, in his encountering on this course some barrier. Since he has the strength neither to surmount the obstacle nor to abandon the enterprise, he remains imprisoned in the attempt and uses up his strength indefinitely renewing it in spirit. Time remains open to the same impossible future, if not in his explicit thoughts, at any rate in his actual being. One present among all presents acquires an exceptional value. We continue to be the person who once entered on this adolescent affair, or the one who once lived in this parental universe. New perceptions, new emotions, replace the old ones. However, this process of renewal touches only the content of our experience and not its structure. One arrests personal time. The past is our true present and does not leave us. It remains hidden behind our gaze. The traumatic experience survives. The privileged world loses its substance and eventually becomes an experience of dread. All repression is the transition from first person existence to an abstraction of that existence, which lives on the memory of having had the memory of a former experience. In fact, repression is a universal phenomenon, revealing our condition as incarnate beings by relating it to the temporal structure of being in the world.[14]
The greatest service done by expression is that it brings it to life in an organization of the signs of the medium of expression. The musical meaning of a sonata is inseparable from the sounds that are its vehicle. Before we hear it, we cannot anticipate it, and after hearing it all we can do is carry ourselves back to the moment of experiencing it. During the performance, the notes are not only the signs of the sonata, but the sonata is there through them. The sonata enters them. We can see this in the whole experience of Swann in Swann’s Way, in which he remembers a phrase of a sonata, and finally discovers the entire piece and hears it played. Another form of expression is the play. In Part I of The Guermantes Way, Proust has the experience of the one he knew, Berma, acting as Phaedra. It appeared to him as the highest point of expression of ease and naturalness. Aesthetic expression confers on what it expresses an existence in itself. It installs it in nature as a thing perceived and accessible to all. To put in the reverse consideration, aesthetic expression plucks the signs, whether the actor or the notes, from their empirical existence and bears them off into another world. In this sense, the process of expression brings the meaning into being or makes it effective. Thus, one is not merely translating the meaning of being but conferring meaning.[15]
What the relationship is between experience, body, and consciousness is not as simple as one might think. We can hold in our consciousness those who are absent. Proust can recognize the death of his grandmother, yet, without losing her, if he can keep her on the horizon of his life.[16] For Proust, intellectual memory limits itself to a description of a past idea, from which it extracts characteristics or communicable meaning rather than discovering a structure. However, it would not be memory if the object that it constructs were not still held by a few intentional threads to the horizon of the lived-through past, and to that past itself as we should rediscover it if we were to delve beyond these horizons and reopen time.[17]
What we have throughout the course of this long work is the apprenticeship to signs, defined by Gilles Deleuze as signs of the social world, signs of life, signs of sensuous impressions, and signs of art. Thus, what is it to regain lost time? What difficulties must the act of regaining lost time overcome? Why does their resolution bear the mark of an ambiguity?
In a famous passage Marcel Proust muses about food’s power to unlock memory. Visiting his mother, she offers him tea, into which he dips a madeleine cookie.
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
Searching his memory, Proust recalls how, as a boy, his Aunt Léonie used to give him that very same treat.
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
For answers, let us move to the second part of the twin foci of the ellipse that is the form of this novel to the final volume, “The Past Recaptured,” (“Time Regained”). It begins with the extinguishing of desire. He has a loss of curiosity that might cause him not to write. One must give up the desire to relive the past if one is to regain lost time. The death of the desire to see things again is accompanied by the death of the desire to possess the women he has loved. He grafts his meditation on time onto the moments of happiness and the premonitory signs. At a deeper level, the speculation on time has its anchor in the narrative as a founding event in the vocation of the writer. This appears to be extra-temporal time, and thus, at a distance from the narrative itself. It has its origin in the thought of the narrator. Yet, the extra-temporal dimension is only at the threshold of time regained. Only the decision to write ends the tension between the narrative of time and the extra-temporal reflection on time. The extra-temporal is a meditation on the origin of aesthetic creation. It becomes a contemplative moment. Time regained in the sense of lost time revived arises out of fixing this contemplative moment in a lasting work. Artistic creation offers its mediation. The decision to write transposes the extra-temporal character of the original vision into the temporality of the resurrection of time lost. In this sense, the work of Proust narrates the transition from one meaning of time regained to the other, and it is for this reason that it is a tale about time. Time becomes the artist that works slowly.[18] Another way to say this is that the narrator recovers the full meaning of his past and thus restores the “lost” time. He has no longer wasted the time he lived, for now it has meaning, as the time of preparation for the work of the writer who will give shape to the unity of his life. The irretrievable past he has now recovered in its unity with the life yet to live. Here is an example of how the modern person wants the future to redeem the past, as the future makes the past part of a life story that has a sense or purpose. One can take up the past in a meaningful unity.[19] This narrated unity is one in which Proust has struck a deep chord in contemporary imagination.[20] Yet, the restoration of time comes at the cost of a pitiless destruction of the illusions of love.[21] Outside of this epiphany, and prior to it, he cannot bring his life together into the usual story of achievement. Only by cohering in a way that cuts across time, which joins widely separated moments of epiphany through memory, can his live have a sense that forms the basis of a recovery of the past that stops the wasting of time.[22] The epiphany occurs between an event and its recurrence, through memory. The original experience hinders the epiphany, for the experience dominates our attention and obstructs the vision behind it. Only in the recall of memory can we see behind it to what the experience reveals.[23]
Proust has presented us with his formula of redemption. We might answer that on the level of style, we have an overarching metaphor. The narrator will say that what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories that envelop us simultaneously with them. The metaphorical relation, brought to light by the elucidation of happy moments, becomes the matrix for all the relations in which two distinct objects raised to their essence and liberated form the contingencies of time. The entire apprenticeship to sights, which contributes to the length of this work, falls under the law that is apprehended in the privileged examples of a few premonitory signs, already bearing the twofold sense that the intelligence must clarify. In this sense, time regained is time lost eternalized by metaphor.[24] At the level of vision, we have recognition. Vision contains recognition that is the very mark of the extra-temporal on lost time. Throughout the book are optical errors, which take on the sense of a misunderstanding. Non-recognition carries with it a dance with death. The hero even fails to recognize Gilberte, placing the entire foregoing quest retrospectively at once under the sign of a comedy of optical errors and on the path of a project of integral recognition. Thus, the meeting between the hero and the daughter of Gilberte is an ultimate recognition scene, to the extent that the young girl incarnates the reconciliation between the two ways, that of Swan and that of the Guermantes. What we can see here is that metaphor and recognition share the common role of elevating two impressions to the level of essence, without abolishing their difference.[25] All of this suggests a third answer the question of regaining lost time, and it consists in regaining the lost impression. One can lose the impression in immediate pleasure, making it a prisoner to its external object. The initial stage of the rediscovery is that of the internalization of the impression. A second stage is the transposition of the impression to a law or idea. A third stage is the inscription of the spiritual equivalent in a work of art. There is supposed to be a fourth stage to which the narrator refers future readers. He says they ought not to be his readers, but readers of themselves, his book becoming a magnifying glass to furnish the reader with the means of reading that which is within them. He admits that he wants to maintain a difficult balance between the impression and the deciphering of signs. The impression maintains the truthfulness of the whole picture. Life becomes an inner book of unknown symbols. The unwritten book is the only book that belongs to us, our true life, and our reality as we felt it to be. On the other hand, reading the book of life is an act of creation in which no one can do for us or even collaborate with us. The narrator says that real life is literature. However, most people do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it. In a sense, then, this entire work is a search for the lost impression. Time regained is the metaphor that encloses differences in the necessary links of a well-wrought style. Time regained is also the recognition that crowns vision. Time regained is the impression regained that reconciles life and literature. Life is the way of time lost. Literature is the way of the extra-temporal. Time regained expresses the recovery of lost time in the extra-temporal. Impression regained expresses the recovery of life in the work of art.[26]
In Chapter 3, he refers to “fragments of existence removed outside the realm of time.” However, “this contemplation, although part of eternity, was transitory.” Such is the flavor of his reflections throughout the volumes. He has recapitulated the disappointments in his life, as far as it had been lived. The “real essence” of his life is not in action. He learned that “disappointment in a journey and disappointment in a love affair” were “different aspects assumed in varying situations by our inability to find our real selves in physical enjoyment or material activity.” The work of art was particularly important. We are not free in the presence of the work of art to do with it as we please. It existed prior to us. We should seek to discover the work of art, even as we seek to discover laws in science. Yet, when art enabled us to make the discovery, it discloses what we ought to hold as precious, while at the same time it remains unknown to us. He admits that regardless of how short our lives may be, “it is only while we are suffering that our thoughts … bring up within our range of vision … all the boundless world … but of which we had no view from our ill-placed window.” We may think some people live without suffering, but suffering is the window to the real life we live. As Proust reflects upon the “real essence” of his life, the real or true life we live, he does so in a way that remains consistent with what Aristotle called “living well” or “the good life.”[27] Proust goes further in saying that people who cause us to suffer through the love we have for them are people we should associate with divinity. The person is a fragmentary reflection, the lowest step of the approach of a temple or pyramid, that grants us joy in place of the sorrow we were suffering. The entire art of living consists in making use of those who cause us suffering as so many steps enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form and therefore to the people of our lives. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, our past is not reducible to the express memories that we are able to contemplate. If so, we could sever our existence from the past and contemplate those threads that are present. We need to enjoy some other way of recognizing the threads of past that opens the past to us directly. Every present as it arises is driven into time like a wedge and stakes its claim to eternity. Eternity is not another order of time, but the atmosphere of time.[28] We see an illustration of this in the appearance of the daughter of Gilberte Swann and Robert de Saint-Loup, symbolizing the reconciliation of the two ways, that of Swann through her mother and that of the Guermantes way through her father. He states that he thought her incredibly beautiful, rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those which years that that he had lost. She was like his own youth. The reconciliation here suggests that artistic creation has a pact with youth. Art, unlike love, is stronger than death. The idea of Time becomes a spur, for it was time to begin if he wished to attain in the course of his life that it had been worth living. It now seemed even more worth living, now that he seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness has some light. One can restore every moment we distort to its pristine shape. One can realize the course of a life within the confines of a book.[29]
Proust could now see his life as summed up in the notion of vocation. He thought he could recapture time “by descending more deeply within himself.” He had a conception of time as incarnate, of past years as “still close held within us.” He concludes that he had “a feeling of profound fatigue at the realization that all this long stretch of time not only had been uninterruptedly lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, my very self, but also that I must … keep it closely by me, that it upheld me, that I was perched on its dizzying summit, that I could not move without carrying it about with me.” The previous sentence, shortened as it was, is typical of his writing. He concludes by saying that his conception of time may give humanity the appearance of monstrous creatures. They occupy “in Time a place far more considerable than they occupy in space, extending boundlessly since they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives … so widely separated from one another in Time.”
David Brooks indicates how deeply this notion of vocation appeals to us today. In describing “a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life,” he describes the need for a “call within the call.”
We all go into professions for many reasons: money, status, security. But some people have experiences that turn a career into a calling. These experiences quiet the self. All that matters is living up to the standard of excellence inherent in their craft.[30]
Such a notion has religious overtones. People have a calling from God to serve in their unique way. The calling may change and evolve over a lifetime. Some may have a calling to parent young children at one stage, and then have a calling to be leaders beyond the home. Some may serve God in “secular” careers, bringing their sense of the divine to work. Such notions are quite “normal” in the world of the church today.
The book makes us hear two narrative voices. The hero tells his worldly, amorous, sensuous, aesthetic adventures as they occur. The narrative marches toward the future, even when the hero is reminiscing. It has the form of the “future in the past.” The hero receives the revelation of the sense of his past life as the invisible history of a vocation. This way of looking at it preserves the event-like character of the visitation. The second voice is the narrator, who says, more than a hundred times, “as we shall see later.” The narrator gives the meaning to the experience recounted by the hero, that is, time regained and time lost.[31] This experience, which redeems time, is a limit experience, unfolding in its own world. In other words, another author could have a different limit experience within the world of that story. Time allows eternity to surpass it. In this way, the tale about time becomes a tale of time and its other. Fiction allows for an unlimited number of thought experiments. It will not tolerate censorship. His supra-temporal experience of Beauty is an initiation.[32]
Between the twin foci of the ellipse of this work is traversed time. Traversal marks the transition from the extra-temporal, glimpsed in contemplation, to Time embodied the extra-temporal is a point of a passage, transforming the fragments into duration. However, this does not suggest the vision of Bergson of a duration free of all extension. It confirms the dimensional character of time. It moves from the idea of a distance that separates to that of a distance that joins. The final metaphor is that of an accumulated duration that is beneath us. The narrator-hero sees people perched upon living stilts that never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples. He sees himself perched upon the summit. Time lost is contained in time regained. More importantly, Time carries us within it. The book closes, not with victory, but with a sense of the weariness and terror of life. Time regained is also death regained. The book generates an interim time, which is that of a work he has yet to accomplish and one that death might destroy.[33]
This work offers the opportunity to explore the imaginative variations produced by fiction and lived time on the level of history. It reveals an aporia when approached by phenomenology as one opens up a split through reflecting thinking between phenomenological time and cosmic time. In their manner of relating to this split, history and fiction begin to differ. When we find in this work is an unusual variation on the polarity between the time of consciousness and the time of the world. The apprenticeship to signs involves the world and consciousness. The cleavage that results opposes time lost to time regained. The time lost is first past time, prey to the universal decay of things. This work is an exhausting struggle against the effacement of traces and therefore against forgetfulness. One also loses time as time dissipates among signs not yet recognized as such, destined to be reintegrated within the great work of recapitulation. Finally, dispersed time is lost, remaining in suspension as long as it has not yet become the thing that one must regain. Until the conjunction of quest and illumination, of apprenticeship and visitation, this work does know where it is headed. The work will have the feeling of disorientation and disenchantment of lost time, since it has not yet received recapitulation into the stately design of a work of art.[34] It illustrates the connection of coincidence as the hero advances toward an uncertain future, and that of the narrator, who forgets nothing. Repetition achieves its significance in the long meditation of this work of art.[35] In this great meditation on time, the extra-temporal realm of aesthetic essences may be a source of deception and illusion. The writer has a vocation, so eternity transforms itself from a bewitchment into a gift. It confers the power of bringing back days gone by. Death and eternity still have a relationship. We see this in the death-like figures seated around the table of the prince de Guermantes at the dinner party following the great revelation. The death of the author threatens the experience of eternity. The combat of eternity and death continues other guises. Time regained through the grace of art is still only an armistice.[36]
This work has a way of putting a modern myth onto its notion of time. It presents hasty and destructive time, but contrasts it with the slow working of Time, the artist. Yet, in both cases, time needs a body to externalize itself and become visible.[37]
The work ends with the words “in the dimension of time.” “In” here means that time contains all things, including the narrative that tries to make sense of the tension between destructive Time and Time the artist.[38]
For my taste, Charles Taylor has identified why this discussion of time as experienced in a secular culture is so important. Charles Taylor discusses the unquiet frontiers of modernity.[39] Among them is our sense of time and the past. The era in which the West lives is a purely secular time understanding allows us to imagine society horizontally, unrelated to any “high points,” where the ordinary sequence of events touches higher time. The radical horizonality is what is implied in the direct access society, where each member is immediate to the whole. He refers to the notion of disenchantment. Time is an instrument a resource one manages, measures, cut up, and regulates. The instrumental stance homogenizes. It defines segments but recognizes no qualitative differences. As he sees it, such a stance is the rigid time frame in which we all live. Secular time is simultaneity, and succession shapes our sense of time-ordering in which there is no place for higher times. Yet, we do not simply have a homogeneous, empty time experience, for humans could not live exclusively in this. Secular time continues to have marks through which we orient ourselves. The primary way in which we meet this challenge is narrative, a more intense telling of our stories as individuals and as societies. Thus, autobiography is prominent. Our interest in history grows intense, especially to make sense of our national stories. Narration is one way of gathering time. Moments are kairotic in that rise out of the narrative and grant meaning. We live with certain cycles, routines, and recurring forms in our lives. We might think of the daily round, the week, the year with its seasons, time of heightened activity, and vacations. We also live through narrations of change growth, development, and realization of potential. One might think of once-for-all moments of founding, revolution, and liberation. The cycle and the narration have a complex relationship and depend upon each other. Pre-modern outlooks looked for the narration in a higher time or in eternity. In the modern world, the single reality giving meaning to the repeatable cycles is a narrative of human self-realization. Thus, one might view it as the story of progress, reason, freedom, civilization, human rights, or the maturity of a culture or nation. The routines of disciplined work, the excitement of innovation, the building of a nation, have a deeper meaning through their place in the bigger story. Among the issues he sees is a certain trendy post-modernism in which the narratives of the modern world have come under attack. Yet, even this approach has a grand narrative: ONCE we were into grand stories, but NOW we have realized their emptiness and proceed to the next stage. In any case, as he sees it, the narrative of human progress is so much part of us that it would be frightening to live in a world devoid of it. Nietzsche is a reminder that such a story has always been under attack. Running through all attacks on the narrative of modernity is the specter of meaninglessness, the denial of transcendence, heroism, and deep feeling. It leaves us with a view of human life that is empty, cannot inspire commitment, offers nothing worthwhile, and cannot answer the craving for goals to which we can dedicate ourselves. Human activity and thought will inspire nothing but a cosmic yawn. Before modernity, it would have seemed bizarre to fear an absence of meaning. Religion seeks to address the concern for meaning by suggesting that it provides the narrative context for meaning and purpose that a secular sense of time cannot. Part of the issue is that the narratives of the success of modernity, such as its science, technology, freedom, economic freedom and innovation, have what some view as a dark side. Unsupported by a believable narrative, the disciplined routines of everyday life become problematic as well. They seem like a prison for the banal. They fail to integrate our lives. They fail to unite our live across repeatable instances. Our sense of the purpose of everyday time disintegrates.
In this context, Proust, as Taylor sees it sees it, is the most brilliant articulator of the lost connection across time. He is also the inventor of new experience-immanent ways of restoring it. He provides a new sense of time and memory. This work builds towards the creation of a subtle language in which one can formulate this sense. He offers a sense of a higher time, built out of the sensibility of a modern living in the flow of secular time. The connections he makes between widely spaced moments appear in the mundane sensual experience of the madeleine, and the rocking paving stone. What arises through the sense of loss in is the need to rediscover a lived time beneath or beyond the objectified time-resource of the disciplined order of civilization. Lived experience is the means through which we either find the way to break out of the iron cage of everydayness or transfigure the world, or to reconnect the lost time.
Let us come back to Ecclesiastes.
The hidden character of the action of God in daily life, which wisdom accepted, can lead to skepticism as to whether God is present active at all. For Ecclesiastes, the action of God has become so hidden that the author cannot see it. The point where contact with the action of Yahweh in history tended to be lost was the point when faith experienced its gravest danger. A form of skepticism arose unique to Israel. It did not doubt that Yahweh existed. It doubted the readiness of Yahweh to interfere in history or in the life of the individual. One might note Psalm 90 in this regard. The period of the monarchy had already broken with the idea that Yahweh acted in dramatic ways in history and in nature. For a period less sure of itself, this idea of the deep concealment of the action of Yahweh could become bitter. Later wisdom taught that the action of Yahweh in history grew weak, and how it was that action of Yahweh became prominent. Only with Ecclesiastes did this skepticism emerge broadly based, with radicalism and with weight. One way to view the book is as a skeptical and marginal note on the tradition of teachers of wisdom. It rests upon the traditional themes of the literature of wisdom, though freely glossing them. The magnificent poem (1:4ff) on the hopeless cycle of all things opens up the view of the world in which the thought and questioning of the book move. In this world devoid of all action of Yahweh in history, the book seeks God. The writer knows that God created the world and acts upon it. However, the calamity of humanity is that people cannot contact this divine action, because God deeply conceals this activity. God has appointed toil for humanity. The writer knows only the empirical way of coming into contact with God. Yet, the world remains silent in the face of this quest for salvation. The writer is suspended over the abyss of despair. The author counsels acceptance and enjoyment of the possible in every case contain a pointer to God. They are the only maxims that bring human action with an almost astonishing directness into connection with a positive will of God. When the text mentions the portion allotted to humanity, it suggests that God has allotted it and humanity is to find contentment in it. Ecclesiastes is a polemical book. What wise person ever claimed to discern all the work of Yahweh under the sun? It could personify the friends of Job. The author pitches a tent on the edges of Judaism with a tragic view of life. Humanity is not able to keep in step with the dark, divine power to which it is handed over. No matter what trouble humanity takes, humanity can never do anything but fail in the attempt to reach accord with the action of this God. Nothing remained for Ecclesiastes, but to submit in deep resignation to this tragic existence.
Theologian Karl Barth made some comments on Ecclesiastes that provides both a comparison and a contrast with Proust. He is close to the explorations of Proust in the sense that it took a revelation or disclosure at the end to reveal how the hero could redeem time. This would be like what he calls the subjective revelation one receives from the Holy Spirit. The contrast, however, is that the subjectivity of this revelation has its counterpart in the objectivity of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In other words, time lost or wasted is outside this revelation. Time regained or redeemed has its definition in Jesus, through whom the believer now lives his life. In some comments on Ecclesiastes, Barth discusses the myth of infinite or endless time. If religion has the purpose of providing a narrative in which human beings find meaning in their everyday activities and in the repeating cycles of their lives, Barth is going to say that Revelation has shattered endless time. Infinite time exists only for a time-consciousness that is unaware of or forgetful of revelation. A time-consciousness aware of revelation will quite certainly not be a consciousness void of time, but full of time and congruous with it. He sees this myth of infinite and endless time expressed in Ecclesiastes. This confession impinges upon the confines of Epicureanism is intended as the sharpest expression of a consciousness of time and life really lived by the presence of God. In the New Testament, we find the description of the same time-consciousness compressed on the one hand into the concept of endurance, on the other hand in the concept of being awake.[40]
The hero of this story, as the hero of the story of your life, needs the epiphany that discloses the meaning of the course one has traveled in life. Such an epiphany makes one awake to the meaning of the live one has lived and will continue to live. Our secularity will say that any epiphany will do. Christianity will say that the content of that epiphany needs to find its definition in Jesus. It ought not to surprise that Christianity will find the answer to time wasted in Jesus. In any case, we might agree in general that openness to an unveiling, disclosure, or revelation may well be the difference between time wasted and time regained.
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[5] The New Lifetime Reading Plan, 4th edition, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997), 240-3.
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[30] David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List,” New York Times, April 11, 2015.
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