At a pre-covid dinner party, I made one of my usual off-hand provocative remarks a propos of I can’t remember what. I said: “Well, of course, time doesn’t really exist.” This elicited skepticism and doubt and I launched into my usual minimally-informed blather about Einstein and Entropy. But I think in this very strange time of social distancing, working from home, virus-on-the-loose, we have a whole new perspective on time. We have been experiencing directly its malleability, its subjectivity, its, well, weirdness and wonder.
This short little video explaining time is far better than my blather:
Always attuned to the zeitgeist 🙂 , over the course of this week I have come across a podcast and a playlist both of which speak to the relationship between music and time and how each is a metaphor for the other.
Here are seven pieces that speak to the Covid-19 time warp: a playlist of music for the unmoored.
And here is a podcast from the always exquisite Radiolab about Beethoven’s relationship to time, especially in regard to his Fifth Symphony.
If you are looking for a novel that is truly perfect reading for our time and such a good read, I highly recommend, along with Ash Carter in Air Mail, the all-time classic The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.
This could be the moment to finally read Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume epic of twentieth-century English life A Dance to the Music of Time.
And this is certainly how I feel about how time is passing:
Jenny McPhee 