For many living through the covid-19 pandemic, the normal patterns of spatial orientation have been disrupted by the mandate for social distancing and lockdowns forcing us to stay at home. Additionally, our normal patterns of temporal acclimation have been interrupted. Upon waking it is often difficult to recall the day of the week as minutes blend into minutes, hours into hours, days into days, and weeks into weeks. Perhaps even more telling is a strange sensation whereby time moves both rapidly and sluggishly, not at succeeding intervals but concomitantly. More troubling than this confluence is the lack of a clear sense of a future as the uncertainty of the moment has left many with a crippling inability to chart the way forward. If it is the case, to paraphrase Velimir Khlebnikov, the Russian Futurist poet and playwright, that the homeland of creation is the future, then it is understandable that in the absence of futurity, summoning the creative muses has been particularly challenging.
In March 2020, as I was confined to my home, I decided to gather together several of my scholarly essays on the nature of time as a way of dealing with the temporal displacement. In addition to revising the older studies, I have written a new chapter that serves as an introduction to the collection. The decision to republish some of my studies has afforded me the opportunity to correct the previously published versions. Discovering mistakes in these publications has been a humbling experience and only demonstrates that despite the sage and eminently practical advice offered by Leonard Cohen, âForget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything,â one still desires and hopes that oneâs offering will be perfect. Alas, this yearning for perfection may be my greatest imperfection. But beyond the opportunity to correct my errors, the rewriting of my studies performs one of the key ideas that has informed my understanding of the curvature of time: we approach the future in the present by reverting to the past where we have never been.
Having been exposed to rabbinic patterns of thinking since early childhood, long before any academic crossed my path, I was deeply impacted by the principle that repetition facilitates novelty and that multivocality is a species of uniformity. These truisms were as natural to the environment in which I was raised as the oxygen that I breathed to sustain my physical wellbeing. As I advanced on my own philosophical journey, I came to appreciate that the hermeneutic underlying these claims is emmeshed with understanding time as the perpetual retrieval of what has never been, the saying again of what is always left unsaid in what is spoken. In several of the studies included in this compilation as well as other publications, I have emphasized that the temporal
I trust by bringing these pieces together I will have created an original orchard of speculation to which future readers are invited to enter and to drink of the waters of wisdom streaming from the philosophical and the mystical sources cited and discussed therein. I do not know if this will be my last monograph, but these arresting words of Fernando Pessoa hover over me at this unusual moment in time as I reflect on the sacrifices and choices I have made in the service of my lifeâs vocation, âI pick the petals off lost glories in the gardens of inner pomp and, past dreamed box hedges, I clatter down dreamed paths leading to the Obscureâ (Desfolho apoteoses nos jardins das pompas interiores e entre buxos de sonho piso, com uma sonoridade dura, as áleas que conduzem a Confuso). I conclude by sharing the poem âcorona apocalypse,â that I wrote several months ago. I trust it captures something of the uniqueness of the global contagion we have each experienced together but alone:
21 March 2020