Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

 It is a commonplace to claim that art imitates life. If so, art, in performing this mimesis, should respond also to our obsession and concern with temporality (time as experienced, not as measured, or human time as opposed to what the metaphysicians claim). How does art participate in this alchemy of smelting clock time into felt time? Read essay at Blue Labyrinths .

  My research paper on “Time and the Observer in Jorge Luis Borges” has been published in the 2020 edition of the Literature & Aesthetics journal released a few days back. Abstract: Jorge Luis Borges is ambivalent in his views of time and is unwilling to completely accept a denial of the reality of time. I argue that this is because a view that refutes time denies the observer too along with it.  Borges tries therefore to identify a reconciliation between a refutation of time and its reality.  (Image: Edwaert Collier - Vanitas Still Life with a Statuette of an Antique Athlete and a Print of Michelangelo (1675) - Public Domain)

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cultures and mythologies too. A n excessive preoccupation, in modern societies, with this “manufactured quantity” - along with an acute segmentation of time - can make us too obsessed with the moment. We begin to think in terms of drops and bucketsful of water rather than seeing the river itself.   A cardinal tenet of the mythology of the Australian aboriginals is “The Dreaming” also referred to as the Eternal Dream Time. This dreamtime is the sacred abode of the ancestors who taught humans the skills needed for life. Although the dreamtime has echoes of a past heroic age, it cannot be fixed in time. As anthropologist W.E.H. Skinner pointed out, “It was, and is, everywhen.” This mythology reflects an endless succession of events symbolised by the cycle of the seasons. This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cu

This is perhaps the irony of life: we would like our lives to last as long as possible: but how do we live with its exhausting continuity? M ost of us have a Janus-like approach to the temporality of our lives: we have one eye on the past and one on the future with no time for the present. With the past, we have this persistent urge to dissect it and in the process are swayed by a whole gamut of feelings and emotions. We recall with evident pleasure some of these past events. Some of us are so proud of our journey so far and our previous ports of call – and confident that others will wish to celebrate this voyage and emulate it even – that we publish memoirs or at least ask others peep into our private lives via things like social media. And we may regret too that some events had not happened and attempt to suppress these memories whenever they try to escape their hiding places in our minds. In his magnificent novel, The Towers of Silence , Paul Scott uses the tin-trunk that M

The reality (however relative) and nature of time appear inexorable and inescapable. One way to cope with this fact is to tell others and share with them our thoughts, feelings and stories – a bit like unity in the face of a common enemy. “ F or whom am I writing this?” wonders eighty-two year old Iris Chase Griffen in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin . “For myself? I think not. I have no picture of myself reading it over at a later time, later time having become problematical. For some stranger, in the future, after I’m dead? I have no such ambition, no such hope.” [i] Many of us are afflicted by this bug for writing – writing in some form or the other, dashing off letters, composing something creative and, if nothing else, at least keeping diaries and journals. George Orwell thought that there were four great motives for writing and they are to be found to different degrees in every writer. We were firstly driven to write by “sheer egoism”, a “desire to seem clever, to be