It was a misread timetable that prompted Fleming to think hard and deep about the problems of time keeping. Railways connected so many places that the inconvenience of calculating timings in terms of dozens of local times prompted the railways to adopt standard times of their own. Eventually, the railroads of N. America agreed to a common standard of time zones. This was the precursor of worldwide standard time. Great Britain had already adopted a single standard time. Blaise is good at tracing Fleming's involvement and influence in the move to standard time, a move that started as a technical problem and of course ended as a political one.
But Blaise also meditates on the effects of standardising time, of removing time keeping from the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset, of midnight and noon. Here, his essay is less successful. Not because he doesn't make excellent points and observations, but because his reinterpretation of Victorian life in many ways breaks new ground, or looks at well known facts and ideas from a new angle. Inevitably, much of what he says is not fully worked out or clarified. He sees the changes in Victorian arts and social fabric as a response to the shift from the natural world of the senses to the abstract world of reason. In this he follows the Romantic criticism of the industrialisation of Europe. But unlike the Romantics, he sees those changes as forerunners of our own problems, not as redefinitions and abrogations of old ones. His argument amounts to a paradox: by freeing ourselves from natural time, we have become enslaved to abstract time. He hints and alludes to this paradox, but does not explicate it. But this very lack of full explication prompts the reader to think about the implications of what Blaise says.
Blaise either forgets or chooses not to explore how early in European culture time became an abstraction. In the Middle Ages, clock time became a guide. The monks were the first to take clocks and calendars seriously, and they used them to order their spiritual life. It was a pope who authorised the recalculation of the calendar, a calendar inherited from the Romans. These clerics were the first to abstract time. The Romans took the first steps towards decoupling holy days from the moon and the sun, defining many of them in terms of their dates in the calendar rather than by the phase of the moon. Christians needed to calculate Easter, a holy day that links the phase of the moon to the position of the sun. The calculation required the abstraction of moon time and sun time so they could be brought into accurate relationship with each other. That, I think, was the beginning of the process that led to Standard Time, and in our own day has led to Universal Co-ordinated Time.
The book is valuable as much for what it suggests as for what it says. What Blaise does say is often spot on, for example his analysis of the effects of a new awareness of time on painting: impressionism and cubism, he says, are attempts to make pictures timeless, to disconnect them from time. When time no longer inheres in the natural objects that surround us, we experience them as moments, as mere surfaces, not as carriers of narrative. Narrative, too, breaks up. Blaise says that Hemingway's style converts time into a series of events. Time is no longer the architecture of a life. To quote a saying he doesn't cite: Life is just one damned thing after another. Plot implies a structure in time, it is a structure in time. Modern literature abandons plot, replacing it with abstract patterns of image and event, of character and response, of perception and memory.
A good book, because it makes one think. ***
