Shelley believed that poetry transcends the moral precepts of its time to present ethical truths that are eternally valid. Yet he was also committed to the power of poetry to effect political change in its present. This chapter approaches the latent contradiction between timelessness and contemporaneity through the figure of “chameleonism.” Shelley mentions the concept in a letter about Adonais, where he suggests that poets are “a very chamæleonic race: they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass.” The formulation suggests a form of inadvertent intertextuality: the poet’s work is colored by other writings whether he intends to or not. The chapter explores how Shelley’s poetry takes its color from discourses surrounding the enslavement of Africans in Britain’s overseas colonies. While Shelley was not purposefully intervening in debates around abolition or the scientific codification of “race,” his writings reflect the anti-Black ideological horizon of his time. Looking at a number of his works, including Adonais, The Cenci, Hellas, and the translation of Plato’s Symposium, the chapter also historicizes the relationship between criticism and ethics: are we entitled to judge Shelley’s racial attitudes with the standards of our time?

When we think in terms of the durability of historical texts, some works instantly come to mind: Herodotus’, Thucydides’, and Polybius’ war narratives, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Jules Michelet’s History of France, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, and Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, among many others. Historians instantly perceive them as durable texts, part of a canon of history and historiography. I examine in this chapter the conditions that might be considered necessary for historical writing to achieve durability, justify why some historical texts have the potential for durability, propose what conditions of creation and reception enabled this longevity, and discuss what practical lessons we obtain from this inquiry. I begin making some distinctions among the three related concepts of durability, the classic, and the canon. I then try to establish the specific conditions of durability of historical texts, focusing on the concepts of Chronotope (Mikhail Bakhtin), the effect of contemporaneity (Gadamer and Koselleck), temporalization (Heidegger, Ricoeur), timelessness (Hartog), and the connections between the concepts of durability and the practical past (Oakeshott, Hayden White).

Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

The messianic religions that came to dominate this lived life of late antiquity made waiting central to their sense of temporality, as we have seen. As the poets of erotics have always known, there is certain headiness in the combination of fervour and deferral. Waiting, however, structures the sense of the present – the now – with a question of its value, its temporariness. ‘Who would deny that the present has no duration?’, asked Augustine. In the nineteenth century, William James tried to answer this anxiety about the duration and thus evaluation of the ‘nowness’ of the now with an empirical, experimentally tested answer: ‘the practically cognized present is no knife-edge’, he concluded, ‘but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions into time’. It was possible to count in seconds, and then in fractions of seconds, a human experience of now, a breadth measured ‘from one five-hundreth of a second to twelve seconds’.

I argue that the conversation in Plato’s Phaedo operates on two levels, and appeals to two different notions of immortality, one temporal (continuing life after death or before birth) and one atemporal (immunity from death, time and all sequential events). Socrates and his friends are concerned about whether the soul will survive beyond the present life, and whether it existed prior to birth. While this looks like a concern about temporal survival, I argue that Plato, as author, is identifying another kind of immortality, proper to the soul alone, as a being outside time, to which 'before' and 'after' do not apply. By examining exactly what is meant by its immunity to death (in a number of senses of ‘death’) and its association with life (in one sense of ‘life’), I consider in what sense the soul could have a kind of atemporal being akin to that which pertains to the Forms, and examine some puzzles about how such a being could enter into temporal experience in conjunction with a sequence of bodies.