This chapter explores how the culturally and medically prized concept of narrative influences pessimism about ageing. Taking dementia as a situation where anxieties about ageing and continuity of self are particularly acute, it illustrates the pressure emanating from narrativity for life as lived and life as narrated, revealing episodicity as a viable response to this two-fold pressure. Reading life histories of older people, it additionally shows that episodicity is hugely relevant also for how life is pitched retrospectively. Overall, this chapter argues that a stronger focus on episodic self-experience throughout life has the potential to challenge aspects of the decline narrative that nourishes pessimism about ageing.

Chapter 5 brings questions of musical time front and centre in order to explore and explicate the diverse temporal modes that co-exist in Schubert’s quartet movements. The static nature of the lyric mode is first considered via a reading of the Andante con moto from the Quartet in D, D94, which furnishes an example of the ways by which Schubert progressivises lyric time. The chapter then considers Schubert’s prominent amalgamation of sonata and variation impulses and its implications for the sense of time articulated by his music since the temporal perspective articulated by variation form is typically understood as being one of retrospection in contrast to the sonata. The role of variation as a technique of expansion is explored via the Quartet in G Minor, D173, and the chapter culminates in a reading of the late G-Major Quartet, D887. The analyses pursue two related ends: first, to analyse the movements’ formal syntax afresh by bringing their variational structures into dialogue with form-functional theory, and second, to demonstrate the role played by ambiguity and form-functional multiplicity in the movements’ generation of competing manifestations of musical time.

From writing the Christian origins to questioning the tracing of origins. Despite generations of scholars, dealing with the questions of the historical Jesus to the life and mission of Paul, the Apostles, oral traditions and the beginnings of Christian writings, little has changed in the description of how Christianity started. To make a fresh start, the introduction outlines a retrospective view on writing history. Instead of asking how we have to describe Christian origins, the book suggests to ask how during the past, beginning from the Medieval period back to the 2nd century authors have conceptualized these beginnings and which sources they have used for the pictures they painted of early Christianity.