TWL - Time Quotes Flashcards
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow
- numbness is preferable to the memories that are stirred
- initial shift into the past tense
- “covering” - protective, but also concealing, leaving emotions, memory and trauma potentially uninterrogated and unresolved
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
- memory has clearly been triggered by the contemporary discussion of the seasons - maintains the lexical field of seasonal language but shifts tenses
- separation of verbs, paradoxical attempt to return to the measured stability of chronology achieved through causally linked events
“talked for an hour”
- apply the ideas of Bergson - has framed the temporality of the memory into a scientific and objective understanding of time whereas the triggering of memory and re-experiencing memory demonstrates that time is experienced subjectively and is ill-defined in spatial terms
"”You gave me hyacinths a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl””
- “a year ago” - specific temporal preposition - demonstrate that there is still a striving towards the concept of the past as a certainty while paradoxically demonstrating that there is an element of free play in which past and present co-exist through a means of mental association
- ultimately demonstrates the free play around a centre which postmodernism then destabilises
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
- drawing on the vegetable myths
- Osiris
- allusions are embedded - for a reader this provokes a Proustian moment in which the memory is suspected initially as a feeling and then can be interrogated to discover its origins
- same with “Frisch weht der Wind”
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
- demonstrates that there is a legacy of history that has to be reconsidered in light of the war etc.
- “shadow at morning” “shadow at evening” - temporal linearity suggests progress, in contrast the “Son of man” will be shown “dust” which is the material representation of the accumulation of time - symbolises the length of history that must be contended with and reviewed which destabilises the optimistic progress that Enlightenment values promised
- directions suggest he is facing East - he will be shown something “different” from the glowing blessing/ promise of God connected to facing the rising of the sun
“winter kept us warm”
“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter”
- have to gain critical distance from the memories in order to re-evaluate and change behaviours
- where once there was complacency
(ie. recognition that what feels like the comfort of being “warm” is actually the bitterness of cold and emotional numbness, literature has awakened a desire to pursue the emotional cultivation of spring)
“dead sound on the final stroke of nine”
“There I saw one I knew…”
- in contemporality, time is experienced as a death knell, the same fatalistic drumming of time as experienced in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
- impending doom
ie. “nine” - the number of circles of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy - ninth circle is for sinners of treachery - perhaps suggests that war is the ultimate betrayal of the bond between humans, gives more weight to the reconnection of “Stetson!”
- reconnection through memory, even in the most unlikely sphere can come sincerity of connection
- the immediate following of the memory then reinvigorates the text and introduces a web of new connections
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
- figure that promises the future
- in actuality, she recalls to mind Madame Blavatsky (late 19th century)
- the most playful passage of the first section - some of the cards are false
- connected to artificiality and uncertainty, future is treated with suspicion
- trickery that she is prophesying the future with reference to the past, and common literary knowledge, “those are pearls” - Ariel’s song in The Tempest which also betrays a sense of trickery or contrivance
- striving towards certainties ie. post-war rise in seances, while also acknowledging the impossibility of this
- any promises made have been exposed as a ruse as farcical as the ones made by a clairvoyante
- question of whether the future is desirable or not - clings onto the certainty of the past (ie. even the prophet draws on the source of literary heritage)
“I do not find/ The Hanged Man”
“fear death by water”
- symbol of being suspended in time - suggested that in actuality the future will continue to surge on forward
- potentially time will be metaphorically experienced as a wave - the centre of the paradox of the modernist relationship to time, time will be experienced as an inevitability and humanity cannot exist suspended in time of the past
- the poem continues in the wave of various characters and temporalities - her prophecy comes to fruition in ‘Death by Water’ - we have been drowned in the wheelings of time similar to him
A Game of Chess
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
“And other withered stumps of time”
- “withered” - suggests natural decay - memory has allowed icons of the past to be forgotten or enter into misremembrance (Philomel = Ovid’s Metamorphoses)
- “stumps of time” - metaphor of the icons as intervened with by human agency, the past has been abandoned because “the world” is unreceptive - only hear a “Jug Jug” instead of the true quality of the song
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
- “ten” “four” - imitates the previous contrast created in Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’
- drawing the contrast between time as experienced objectively and time experienced subjectively
- relating to Woolf’s Modern Fiction - this is the equivalent of “take the ordinary mind” on “an ordinary day” - “innumerable shower of atoms” - the mind makes free associations and is never suspended
- questions of how to navigate the future before them
- a similar sentiment of hyperbolical progression can be traced in 1925 The Great Gatsby - “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon,” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”
- time can no longer offer a logical shape to the experience of life - trying to relocate their roles in society (“game of chess” - striving towards the reintroduction of rules)
“if it rains” - modal verb, provisionality indicates the attempt to regain control (conditional tense)
“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”
- uncomfortable voice
- might question whether we trust it
- seems to promise the achievement of equal progress but, notably, time has not been favourable to the women
“You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique” - places the attitudes of the past (ie. carpe diem) and reorientates them in a modern context - the voice of the intelligensia existing alongside that of the working class
- references Andrew Marvell later - “but at my back”
“they will not grow old as we grow old”
For the Fallen - Poem by Laurence Binyon
“a crowd flowed over London Bridge”
- “flowed” - relation to Bergson’s idea of ‘duration’, life is an amalgam of demarcated experiences but actually is experienced as the continuous flow of experience
- the sense of surging towards the future
- teases the potential promise of hope ie. “Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours” - suggests order and structure which is then undercut by the enjambment that just as swiftly destroys this
- also they believe they are surging towards the future when in reality there is the constant overhang of the “brown fog” that haunts the scene
- potentially implicates reader also with the specificity of geographic location
- war is experienced in the temporality of catastrophism ie. long delay and then sudden catastrophe - reflects how war has been a build-up to a final catastrophe which is the condemnation of society to the frigidity of a frozen wasteland
