Questions of space and time were issues in all the texts I taught today, in three different classes on three different things. I feel behind on work, and the students feel behind on Spanish and on general knowledge. At the same time the authors of the texts we are reading, and the characters in them feel they are behind temporally or else caught in spaces which are behind the times — or feel caught in spaces where everything is all too new.
I had a professor, a medievalist who could lecture in Latin. He said space and time were problems in every text, but modernism and its partner colonialism seem to be about not quite having caught up, or about having landed in an unfamiliar space. One is at the edge of a new continent and the time is out of joint. Valéry said we had conquered ubiquity but most do not feel themselves to have managed this yet. They have been assigned the task, however, and they are aware of it.
On this view the question is not who is late or early. The feeling that one is late is a symptom, a part of the modern syndrome.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 