Some things I was thinking about while reading Culture of Space and Time:

In this book it talks about time. And space. And how it shaped modern culture.  I have in my notes on this assignment, like 12 questions;  How is time reversible? How do we ever experience universal time? How can I or anyone really know when our time is ours or everyone’s or? What is time then? What is time’s number, texture, and direction? What about music?

…And then the list gets super weird.  My thoughts on this text are pretty standard.  I am wondering about public time versus private time mostly.  I liked the statement, “Divisions of time ‘brutally interrupt the matter that they frame’” (32), especially in relation to personal time and the impact on the creation of art, or things which people can associate with their culture that take “time” to do, prayer, art, philosophy, science, and other rituals…

It’s interesting to think of the division of time as an invitation to a new kind of space.  We’re not all in our own worlds experiencing life with whatever increments our mind’s use, the universality of the measurement of time, the standardization of the minute, hour, second… It make many wonderful things possible, measuring the age of the Earth, making advancements in science not only in that respect but also in how people understand the mind (Yeah, I’m talking Freud now).  The importance of memories was augmented by the advent of a new, public, social anxiety, and cultures across the world shifted their focus from their arbitrary worlds and instead, focused on existence at a global scale.

I was thinking about how this relates to Proust.  He wrote a book symbolizing how experiences, impressions, compounded and ever compounding, cease to exist once they are named or attempted to be objectively/Truthfully remembered.  We are no longer who we were one second ago even, so our rememberances, are never the same as when we were in the past and living them because we are never the same after any experience, after any measurement of time and input of stimuli.

An idea I attribute to Proust’s work so far is that recollection and remembering can and do place us out of time involuntarily, and only then can we experience a True past.

That notions is shown in this other book through the development of memory therapy with the mentally ill, it’s shown in art with the abstract paintings of clocks with no hands, in new experiences with cinematography and what shows that time-is-happening or this-happened-long-ago.  I think in this way we can all relate to what Proust is trying to comment on in relation to the time part of living.