Time

Time
     by Earned a Modest Salary as a Sessional Instructor    

     at the University of Manitoba 

      

"What did he mean, Ryan, do you think, that a thinker has only one idea in his lifetime?" Silence. Ryan looks at me, smiles a little, unaccustomed to being singled out, red starting to form under his eyes, and shakes his head. One of the smartest students in the class, he feels both too conspicuous to say anything and inadequate because unacquainted with the text.

       "Mandy?"

       "Don?" Don at the back listens to everything but says little, ever. He wears a baseball cap curled around his eyes and looks down except when something interests him. His face lifts for a moment until he realizes that he has been noticed.

       "Anyone?"

       "Well," I say, "he meant, I believe, that the thinker discovers early what preoccupies him all of his life. Not only new ideas excite the philosopher as if he machined them daily out of some raw idea material like plasticine that he worked for the purpose of entertaining himself.  The philosopher / thinker (same thing) chooses to be one only because he finds himself haunted by an idea of which he longs to rid himself and he attempts that through writing a series of texts that explain the world to the world as the new idea must restructure it. Much more difficult than explaining the intricacies of the internal combustion engine, or the arithmetic of space flight, or the exact construction of the genetic system, philosophy's new idea requires the entire world to be reexamined."

       "Yes, Mandy?" Mandy is not unintelligent, but she waits till so and so much has been explained about the idea to hand that she feels safe and unexposed enough to contribute.

       "Sir," (only careful, cautious students address me as "Sir,") "does that mean that the world is reinvented by the philosopher?"

       "Can you elaborate? What do you mean, exactly?"

       "Well, you said that the world must be entirely re -explained. That means to me that it is a new world he makes, I think."

       "A good point, indeed, but I don't think that it entirely explains the dilemma for the thinker. What exactly makes this enterprise so difficult for him? If he was inventing a new world, imagining a brand new place, which he created somehow through language, we would have something largely unrecognizable--Kafka did it. In part. Maybe in whole--but we would not recognize that world. Its borders and objects would at best appear only vaguely familiar. The philosopher must actually re-explain the old world so that it remains old and not new. Its newness is that, instead of having been an inadequate world, which his brilliance has recently made better than it was, relying thus on the common reasoning that the new improves the old, he has made the old world older than it had become, more ordinary than it has become to be seen from its future, and more clearly recognizable that it was in that future." I inspect myself as I speak, and my inward being smells unwashed. It needs a good scrubbing, I think, and then I think that I always regret any lengthy contribution I myself make. Unlike Mandy, though, I go on into the burning house hoping to stumble through on the other side. I do not stumble, or mean "stumble" as less or inadequate, but go on until what smells no longer makes me feel my own abjection but delivers me rather from it into a sense of the inevitability of the adequacy of my constructions. Stammering is more than smooth speaking, I have often thought to myself, I think now. Smoothness of speech is less than stammering.

       "A great difficulty faces him," I continue, beginning to be aware of the clock and the time left in this lecture. "Everything needs translation. What we once saw with wool before our eyes we now see-- because of him, because of his writings--though fine corrective lenses. The reality of past individuals' worlds and history's particulars suddenly come before us with startling and unsettling clarity. Birth, life, death and the afterlife confront us smiling, beckoning to us as a prostitute might on a side street in Chatemoq. We wish to turn and run, knowing so little of welcoming woman's state, feeling such moral uncertainties and certainties. Pre history, history and after history have clamoured in the thinker to be freed of our common false and vague interpretations of them. He brings before us everything; he takes on responsibility for all that was, is and will be; he feels overwhelmed. That is why, Mandy, he frantically works for forty years on his project of love and then dies young. Often without marrying. Often without experiencing sexual union, ever. Atlas never wished as fervently as he does to be freed of his burden. At such a tender age to be so saddled by a new idea! The heart pities him. We pity the thinker!"

       I ask my students the time. Eight minutes left in the period. "Any questions?" None. "For Thursday study his notions of pity," I say. A few students, the three on the left who like this class a lot, I know, by the fact that they regularly linger afterward, whisper amongst each other as they stand by the long table. The empty rock sample cases at the back of the classroom reflect the light of the fluorescents. The board needs erasing and I do that. I walk to my office in the limpid blue light of eleven o'clock a.m. A tree of sparrows buzzes. The sand on the sidewalk makes walking a bit treacherous for someone my age. Going past the cafeteria I am startled by the smell of Tuesday's meatloaf. In the tunnel students file past one at a time or two abreast. The clock in the administration-building tower rings out the hout.