A new time

When I checked the date of my last post, it is Sept. 5, 2011. In French, I would say "j'ai la honte," that is, I am pathetic! Nine months have passed. Lots of things took place during the time: I submitted my prospectus; my prospectus got passed; I taught two courses; I went to visit my brother in SF; I received a fellowship for my research abroad. And many more. On the other hand, nothing seemed to happen at all. Right now, I am sitting on the window seat in my living room, looking over the quiet street outside and musing upon whatever in my head, or nothing. That was exactly the situation one year ago, when I started this blog. I love summer time in Cambridge.    

Time is an interesting thing. Everyone agrees that it is irreversible. It flows in one direction, like a river. But time is never an abstract concept. It associates with things in this world and our experiences. Hence, the contour of its flow becomes more complicated. Sometimes, it repeats itself, either through a natural pattern (seasonality, for example) or by personal experiences. We can also think about memory, which makes our past part of our present. Surely we can contemplate a historical time, that is, a time flowing from the past to the present. Many historians contemplate this issue. One of my former advisors even claimed that the conception of time is the key factor to distinguish a modernist from a post-modernist perspective.

What does this mean? Let's put these technical jargons aside, and just think about a popular narrative of time - a progressive time. This makes sense at the first glimpse: with the development of science and technology, we are living in a better world than those who live in the Middle Ages. Barely can we find a person who prefers to live in the past, no matter how nostalgia he/she is, where epidemics abounded and the living condition was miserable. This progressive narrative, though, is not without problems. These days it has become a tacit knowledge among historians that a progressive time does not do justice to history, because it usually engages the use of applying modern standards to the evaluation of the past. This inevitably ends up with a glorious celebration of the present at the expense of dismissing the past as backward, unsophisticated or even alien. The end result: a complete disconnect between the past and the present. Historians wouldn't be very happy about that.

Let's listen to what Walter Benjamin, the eminent social critique in the early 20th century, comments on the topic. Here are his words on a painting by Paul Klee :

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." 

What historians try to do is to remove the violence of progress in order to "awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed." 

Why do I say so much gibberish about time and history? I don't know. I would like to say more things about Benjamin's fascinating writings. But at the moment, it might serve to alleviate my guilt of not writing for my blog for such a long time. Time is not a linear, seamless thing. Neither is my blog writing. Enough about excuse. Now I want to initiate a new time for my blog, to keep writing in the following year, when I will travel extensively. Let's see where my angle flies.