Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor’s Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Goethe and the Paideia
- 2 Pythagorean Mysticism/Democritean Wisdom
- 3 The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics
- 4 From the Cradle to the Cave: A Comedy of Ethics from Plato to Christian Asceticism (via Rembrandt)
- 5 Mystic Paths, Inward Turns
- 6 Pasca l’s Miraculous Tongue
- 7 Spinoza, Leibniz or a World ‘Less Exquisitely Organized’
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor’s Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Goethe and the Paideia
- 2 Pythagorean Mysticism/Democritean Wisdom
- 3 The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics
- 4 From the Cradle to the Cave: A Comedy of Ethics from Plato to Christian Asceticism (via Rembrandt)
- 5 Mystic Paths, Inward Turns
- 6 Pasca l’s Miraculous Tongue
- 7 Spinoza, Leibniz or a World ‘Less Exquisitely Organized’
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
– ah yes, I nearly forgot, speak of time, without flinching, and what is more, it just occurs to me, by a natural association of ideas, treat of space with the same easy grace[.] (TN 390)
The Unnamable's gentle rhyme mocks the presumed ‘natural association’ between time and space. He continues: ‘as if it [space] were not bunged up on all sides, a few inches away, after all that's something, a few inches to be thankful for, it gives one air, room for the tongue to loll, to have lolled, to loll on’ (TN 390). Restricted space gives way to time; from an infinite form, to its present perfect, to the continuity of the phrasal verb, each ‘loll’ of the tongue complicating a simple correspondence between space, time and language. Yet the image of one inches before a wall imagining the nature of space beyond triggers the familiar paradox of Zeno's progression by halves, or the sorites problem of Endgame, where an infinity of space plunges into an infinite regress between the subject and a limit, as the Unnamable speculates:
[…] the question may be asked, off the record, why time doesn't pass, doesn't pass, from you, why it piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides, deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, other's time, the time of the ancient dead and the yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither dead nor alive, with no memory of anything […] saying any old thing, your mouth full of sand, oh I know it's immaterial, time is not one thing, I another, but the question may be asked, why time doesn't pass just like that (TN 389, my emphasis)
The ‘natural association’ of linear time with linear space is, in Beckett's texts, constantly stymied by paradoxical intuitions of correlative infinites of space and time. And if time is ‘immaterial’, lacking substance, it is not ‘immaterial’, of no concern, for time may be accordingly material (substantial, of concern): ‘time is not one thing, I another’.
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- Information
- Samuel Beckett's How It IsPhilosophy in Translation, pp. 76 - 109Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018