M. Flaherty, The textures of time

James Aho

in: Human Studies 34 (1), 2011.

Abstract

There is public time with its calendars, clocks, and plane schedules. Then there is my own time, time as it is actually lived, how it is thought, seen, remembered, and felt. Most social historians deal with time in the former sense, viewing it (say, like Mircea Eliade) as a never-ending cycle of the same thing over and over again. Others see it as a linear continuum composed of once only intervals of equal length—days, hours, seconds, etc.—having a specific starting point in the past and an end at some date in the future. In both of these cases, time is pictured as something “out there” independent of us: coercive, unchanging, and universal. Flaherty takes issue with this viewpoint, saying that “nothing could be further from the truth” (11). For Flaherty, the “textures of time” are best understood as residing “in here,” so to say, as a pivotal component of ordinary consciousness.

Cited authors

Eliade Mircea