Aftter I finished reading The New York Times' article on Sedona, Arizona - which I encountered on October 26th of last year, and which I mentioned in my blog posting yesterday - I opened up the Saturday/Sunday, October 26-27, 2024, edition of The Wall Street Journal. The Journal had another article I immediately recognized should be featured in my blog. The article was titled, "Time Recaptured" in the hard copy version of the paper. When you click that link, you will find that the online title is different.
The article I am talking about was featured in The Journal's "Books" section, which highlighted the picture reproduced above. That picture is very much like an image that I used in my "Trucker Time" blog posting published in October 2020. The picture from that 2020 blog posting (reproduced below) was also captured from an article in the "Books" section of The Wall Street Journal:
"Time" is always a timely topic!
The Journal's most recent article - the one I read on October 26th of last year - was a review of a book by Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World. Herring's book is, apparently, "the first biography of Henri Bergson in English." At least, that is what Herring says.
Frankly, I found that claim rather surprising. Bergson is a Nobel Prize Laureate, and is well-known in the English-speaking world, including being known by me. I checked, and my memory had not betrayed me. As I had correctly remembered, I have a well-underlined paperback version of Bergson's Time And Free Will on my own, personal bookshelves. That paperback edition of the book was published in 1960, and I read the book right around then. Time and Free Will was originally published in 1889 (in French). So, I really am surprised to hear that no one has done an English language biography of Henri Bergson after all these years.
I have not double-checked Herring's claim, but if no one has done an English language biography of Bergson until now (sixty plus years from when I read Time And Free Will in English and over 130 years from the date it was first published in French), I certainly do think it's high time!
Speaking of "Time," which was a major focus for Bergson, it was Bergson's contention that our usual relationship to time is fundamentally flawed. Time, in fact, is "immeasurable unless ... you stop it in its tracks," as Herring explains in her book:
When we “clock” time, we cut it into segments, then place these next to each other ... “like interchangeable beads on a string.” In doing so, we make time into a three-dimensional object. We make time into space.But time is rarely experienced in this way: A minute can seem like hours; a day can feel like a few short minutes. When we live in time, we observe no border between one moment and the next. Bergson called the human experience of time durée—time lived as continuous flow.
If you think that our understanding of "Time" is consequential - that it is "important" - then I hope you will consider rereading my 2020 blog posting on "Trucker Time." In that blog posting, I suggest that George Fox, the first Quaker, had the best statement on "Time."
Ye have no time but this present time, therefore prize your time, for your soul’s sake.
Simply put, we live in the "NOW."
Now is when we are alive (not yesterday, or some other time in the past, and not tomorrow, or some time in the future).
NOW!
Now is when we act (or fail to act). Now is when we can do something "new," something never even thought about before.
NOW is when we can change the world - a world that must be changed!
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