Time Passes

Not yet

“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, there would be no present time. But, then, how is it that there are the two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet?” – Saint Augustine, Confessions: Book XI

The continuousness of space and time seem obvious. Both are embodied in our everyday experience; just as we move through space progressively, we experience the passing of time sequentially. When we account for space and time, we use calibrations in measuring systems based on discontinuous whole number divisions (millimetres on a ruler, calibrations on a clock dial, equal tone intervals in a musical octave) that cannot completely record what is being measured.

In fact, both space and time are based on the idea of division, severance and separation. The word ‘space’ derives from the etymological root SPA, meaning span, stretch or interval. ‘Time’ derives from the etymon TEM – to cut or divide – and is cognate with the word ‘temple’, which is from the Greek temenos: a space set apart (for sacred practices). Space and time have a curious intrinsic affinity. We say the phrase ‘a span of time’ or ‘a space of time’; we speak of the passage of time and of spatial passageways. In these cases we are dealing with the figure of spreading, of expansion and extension, of pacing and spacing-out, of spawning. 

The apparent contradiction between continuity and discontinuity in our dealings with space and time is, at one level, a mark of incommensurability. Discontinuous systems cannot account for continuity; there will always be a discrepancy – an irreconcilable gap. An example of this is the incommensurability between the sequence of polygons of increasing sides and the circumscribing circle towards which the sequence tends without ever reaching it. Or, in music, between the octave and the run of individual whole tones that constitute it. There will always be an (infinitesimal) interval, a leimma, a residue resulting from the impossibility of closing the gap. 

At another level, the inevitable contradiction between continuity and discontinuity can be manipulated to advantage. In cinema, for example, rather than smooth over the fact that film depends on the illusion of continuity between frames – each projected at 24 frames per second – one can draw expressive potential from the discrepancy through cuts, flashback and multiple coexisting timeframes. In architecture, the play between continuity and discontinuity – in space, in volumetrics, in detailing, in materiality, in the orchestration of experiential sequences, in the production of diverse atmospheres – can equally be manipulated to expressive advantage.

Seasoning

“No philosopher has thought of conceiving Time as monotonous duration constituted by succession, according to a uniform motion of qualitatively similar moments. None has found it interesting to consider Space as simple extension resulting from the juxtaposition of homogenous elements, like an extension of superimposable parts. All of them prefer to see Time as an ensemble of eras, of seasons and epochs, and Space as a complex of domains, of climates and orientations.” – Marcel Granet, La Pensée Chinoise

In his seminal 1934 book La Pensée Chinoise, French ethnologist Marcel Granet foregrounded the idea that space and time are not independent, abstract or neutral conditions. Rather, they co-inform and produce charged circumstances that enable distinct possibilities and opportunities to emerge. These circumstances are characterised by qualities that lend them distinctive ambiances and atmospheres. The characteristics of a particular space or time are not merely the product of some quantitative geometric or formal measure such as area or volume, hours or minutes. We are not dealing with ‘space’ and ‘time’. Rather, we are dealing with place and occasion, both of which are specific and acculturated; both of which come into play as occurrence and situation, in this place here and at this time now.

What counts is not clock time but sensed time, felt time, time experienced in terms of the circumambience of a moment, the mood it draws from us, the pervasive atmosphere that emerges; the slow time of holidays, time turning over at each birthday, time running out, the expanding luminosity of a winter sunset, the longue durée of history, the reverie of Paradise, the ever-present dreaming, the urgency of things, the always-already, unrealisable instantaneity of the digital. 

What takes place

“Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place … man is a transition … enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially ‘absent’. Absent in a fundamental sense – never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future – essentially absenting and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence.” – Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker 

The present has no real being. It has no presence. It is forever passing into a past that is no longer. Heading towards a future that is not yet. The present moment is radically insubstantial, it is always withdrawing, always absenting itself. This means that our experience of time is always in its passing and passing away, in its interminable expiry and annihilation. In Japan, this evanescent atmosphere might have something to do with the aesthetic category of wabi-sabi. As Andrew Juniper writes in Wabi-sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence: 

Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things … [in] humbleness, asymmetry, and imperfection.

Wabi-sabi refers to the affective atmosphere or the aura of a being, a place or a thing, rather than to its form or external appearance. It is a sensibility that finds melancholic beauty in the impermanence of things – their ephemerality, evanescence and always impending disappearance. But if melancholia applies at all to wabi-sabi, this would not be based – as in Western aesthetics – on the longing and desire for ideals, for permanence in the impermanent and the relative, or the sadness that comes with realising that the permanent and absolute are unattainable. Rather, it would refer to the acceptance, appreciation and enjoyment of the impermanent as such; of the poignancy of beauty lost in the passage of time; of the beauty of the modest, rustic, imperfect, decayed, worn, weathered and eroded.

When architecture recalls the palpable presence of the temporary, ephemeral and evanescent qualities of place, it provides multiple footholds for reflection and appreciation of those qualities, each in its own time and at its proper pace. It is through circumspection – through attentive looking about, being on-the-lookout and listening-out for – that time is noticed, precisely because circumspection does not fix its gaze, but rather makes of it a loose and open framework that allows us to notice, with discrimination yet without judgement, the passage of what comes to pass, of what takes place. U

1. In the Hindu tradition, this residue (vastu) is essential not accidental; it is cognate with the space of dwelling (vastu), with the productive vastness of the interval (vas): “Name and Form are in the residue. The World is in the residue. Indra and Agni are in the residue. The Universe is in the residue. Heaven and Earth, all existence, is in the residue”. Atharva-Veda Samhita, Book XI, Hymn 7:1–2. Quoted in Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple. Volume I, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2002 (1976), 45.