In Search of Time
June 7, 2007
by Michael
I always liked the sorts of stories that featured people happening onto vast quantities of time: successful alchemists or sorcerers, the Wandering Jew, that guy from the Sandman books who doesn’t die, some of the Narnia books or that magical mall where time in the outside world stands still in Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Twilight Zone-type watches or other devices that “stop” time for everything except the protagonist, Groundhog’s Day, and so forth.
I’m also frequently irritated, however, by the fact that people usually don’t know what to do with this time when they get it. They tend to throw it away in the pursuit of money or pleasure or some personal advantage over others. On the other hand my own fantasies about achieving immortality or near-limitless “frozen” time usually involve libraries. It should be obvious why:
My copy of The Tale of Genji is nearly twelve hundred pages. Proust and Gibbon, each of whom I would really like to reread one of these years, are around three thousand standard-sized pages each. St Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard is around four thousand (I’ve only read three so far!) pages of double-columned small print, and that’s only about half of his brilliant and fascinating oevre. (Never mind Aquinas and Scotus, to round out the greatest of the scholastics—too depressing to think about). John Henry Newman’s posthumous correspondance alone fill over thirty volumes, not to speak of the dozens of works published in his own lifetime. Anthony Trollope wrote around seventy novels, most of them pretty large. Bach left over a thousand musical compositions, Telemann over three thousand. Migne’s Patrologia series (both Greek and Latin) fill three hundred seventy-eight enormous volumes, while the Loeb Classical Library is now around five hundred, although its volumes are considerably smaller.
There’s just not enough time in our allotted threescore years and ten to read everything I want to, or even a small fraction of it. I need more.
Comments
On June 7 at 12'36 PM
, Joseph Method wrote:
My girlfriend, Amy Taylor, wrote about her frustrations with too many books and not enough time here. I think she did a pretty good job. She introduces the useful concept of the “book taco”. I need to put the book taco images back into the post, but you can get the idea by reading it.
On June 8 at 10'41 AM
, g wrote:
I don’t know what you’re problem is, loser, but I already read all that.
On June 8 at 10'42 AM
, Mike G. wrote:
This brought Borges to mind. I’ve embraced the notion of what’s been lately described as an antilibrary; it keeps my reading priorities in order.
On June 8 at 10'53 AM
, Michael Sullivan wrote:
Medax!
Oh, and “you’re” problem appears to be English.
By the way, Mr Method, “you’re” girlfriend’s post totally upstages mine. How embarassing! The book taco is indeed an everpresent part of the reading life, and there are no solutions, not even specialization. No one is so good at their specialty as to achieve the kind of mastery they aim at, precisely because the necessity for the “contextual” information is always intruding itself.
One good thing I’ve noticed about the neverending quest to acheive adequate knowledge about something (anything) is that one’s own growing knowledge, accompanied as it necessarily is by the growing realization of one’s own deficiencies, also gives insight into the necessary limitations of others’ knowledge. I find I’m no longer so overawed by people who give the appearance of infinite and encyclopaedic knowledge on any subject in which I have some competence, because it so quickly reveals itself as a put-on. For instance I know people who seem to know everything about philosophy, Christian theology, Church history, patristic literature, and so on, and use their appearance of erudition to bludgeon others in argument; I but at their ages it’s literally impossible for them to have read everything they act like they’ve read. Pretty soon with a little careful attention you can start to discern the (relatively few) primary sources and the somewhat larger but definitely limited body of secondary literature from which all their information comes.
Of course one does not educate oneself merely in order to gauge the extent of others’ learning, but the bullshit-detecting skills that start to develop with a lot of careful reading are certainly a nice bonus.
On June 8 at 10'56 AM
, Michael Sullivan wrote:
Mike G,
I was calling “g” a liar, not you!
Yes, Borges is good at indicating the hopelessness of reading everything. The world’s library is not actually infinite, but as far as we’re concerned it might as well be.
It might be helpful if I had Funes’ memoriousness; perhaps then we wouldn’t want to reread to often and could always be reading something new. Of course that would bring along its own set of problems.
On June 8 at 11'27 AM
, Mike G. wrote:
(Fear not, Mr. Sullivan. I have a rule of thumb that leaves 40 minutes or so for crossposting lag in replies.)
Yes. The gap between what’s remembered and what’s properly comprehended (that prompts so much of my rereading upon recall) being one of the larger problems.
On June 8 at 7'09 PM
, Anonymous wrote:
Mr. Sullivan #4: I believe you meant “mendax”. “Medax” means “cure”. “Vanidicus” would be even better.
On June 8 at 9'19 PM
, Michael Sullivan wrote:
“Medax” is a late variant on “mendax”, anonymous, and does not mean “cure”. Perhaps you were thinking it was somehow derived from or related to “medeor” as “mendax-medax” is from “mentiri”, but I’ve just looked and found no evidence for this. The related words are rather “medicus”, “medico”, “medicor”, and of course “medicinus” and “medicina”.