# Editing Internet Texts/The Concept of Time in Literature

The concept of time is one of the most debated in the history of humanity, since the beginning it has awake a sense of mistery and doubt, and so many civilizations had started to questioning about what the time really is. In this page i want to illustrate and explain how the concept of time was treated through different writers in different phases of literature, from such a variety of men all burdened of his inexorability. This is going to be like a kind of walk in the literature of the past to understand and be conscious how a single concept can affect society and culture. We will start from the latins writers, ending with the 19th and 20th century authors.

## Classical authors
### Greeks

The whole Greek lyric face this argument, expecially from Mimnermus, in a Hedonistic and pessimistic way, that leads him to prefer a young death instead to suffer the old age, so empty of pleasures and entertainment. This conception is similar at the Alcaeus one, with his quote "In vino veritas" he want to explain how life is short, and what really matter, is drinking to have fun and do not think about the problems of life. Same way of thought is Horace, with "Carpe diem" he mean we have to seize the day, so we should enjoy every day of ours lifes because each of those could be the last, due to the uncertainty and precariousness of the future.

### Epigrammatists

The fugacity of time recur to be treated from the epigrammatists of the Greek anthology, both from the Hellenistic period, with Leonidas of Tarentum and Asclepiades of Samos, and from the Byzantine period, with Palladas, in his works there is all the weight of the consciousness that roman world is slowly replacing the greek one. His vision is pessimistic and gloomy, almost frantic.The generation of men breed and fed for the death live only for a short period and as it come from it disappear. This is a theory bounded to Stoicism, they said that the passed time belong to the death and no more to the person.

### Seneca

A different tesys is supported by Seneca in his De brevitate vitae, he split the life in three different moments:past, present and future. The present is short; the future is unsure; the past is sure.
So here the past is no more considered in the hands of the death, and this became the only temporal human ownership, sacrosant and inviolable, "perpetua eius et intrepida possessio est" However, it is not for everyone so, because only the wise man, who has always used his time well in search of virtue, Can recall, with pride, the past, reconsidering moments spent "at their command and pleasure," while the other men, too busy in thousand activities, do not willingly turn to their past, for fear and shame of time who have inevitably lost, “iniucunda est paenitendae rei recordatio…”. Seneca defines these men "busy", that is, affectionate, because they live at the mercy of countless commitments that take away their time to think for themselves. So their life is an obsessive expectation of an unsure future, uncertain, loaded with new occupations, long-term plans, and the present is very short and elusive as it is always in the race, it flows, it collapse, “ in cursu enim sempre est, fluitet praecipitatur…”, like a river. The Senecan work is to refute the thousand-year-old belief, date back to Aristotle, that human life is too short, when it's so because men do not know how to use it. For the first time it face time not by quantity, but by quality. In this regard, Seneca makes a distinction between "busy", most of humanity, victims of time, and the "sapiens", his tamer, giving rise to one antithesis between time and wisdom, which appears throughout all the De brevitate vitae. The busy ones, distracted by their thousand "negotia", riches, public office, do not realize the inevitable passage of time, if not when it is too late, and while they are careful money savers, avoiding to squander it, they are not equal with time, squandering every day. For this reason, Seneca makes the example of a man who, if he made the record of his past, He would find himself with many years less because he was stolen in large numbers by creditors, women, clients, quarrels, which prevented him from fully realizing or taking care of his own person.

## Modern and contemporary authors
### William Shakespeare

Time is an interesting concept to consider in Shakespeare's (26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) Sonnets. Normally, it’s presented in a manner that indicates it as the enemy of both the speaker and the people that he addresses his sonnets to. Time is indeed pictured as some kind of monster or beast that "devours" those around and which takes away their life and energy through the passing of the years. What both the speaker and his beloved are forced to acknowledge for, is that’s no matter how beautiful the beloved is today, tomorrow, he or she will be old thanks to time's sovereignty over the human form, just like as showed in the final couplet of sonnet 12, “and nothing against the time saith can make defense”, a period where Shakespeare express the inability of the man toward the inescapeability of time. The sonnets, however, through their act of immortalizing the beloved, clearly work to counteract the decaying impact of time and to triumph over its mastery. Even through the use of personification, Shakespeare confronts the natural changes which creates and destroys life. He is sensitive to the frailty of the peak of life, even thanks to his experience of dramatist that made him much acknowledged in complexity of human being and feelings, and he knows how time hastily takes it as soon as it is displayed. He strives through the Sonnets to capture the youth so quickly lost during time. Subverting the conventions of Petrarchan poetry, Shakespeare concerns his subject as an imperfect one, submitted by the conditions around it and by the pasting of the time, and even the metrical structure provides on this: usually the first three quatrains analyzes the qualities of his subject, while the last untrimmed couplet leaves to the reader the impression of something that isn’t static,that isn’t ever durable, but frail, short and mortal, even expressed in sonnet 73, trough the use of metaphors.

### Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) is one of the major innovators in French literature. The poetry "The Enemy" contained in the "Flowers of Evil" describes the devastating effects of time on human life. Baudelaire expresses the passage of time as something cruel and who devours us inexorably, offering a strong perception of the void of existence without knowing its meaning. Life is like a garden whose fruits, once lush, are dried, leaving room for desolation. The past time has sucked and devastated Baudelaire's soul waiting for new flowers to regain the joy of living and writing in order to create a new beauty. But the final exclamation is a desperate cry of a conscious man who will always be settled by an enemy consuming vital momentum: boredom.
Poetry reveals the anguish of the poet when he finds the signs of time on his body. It is shaped by an existential discomfort through art that is a way of exorcising; Writing is the only cure for the insults of time and self-disgust that inspires the poet to his progressive degradation: art allows to oppose the resistance of intelligence to the corrosive force of nature. The poet then survived for his word.
"The Clock" is the last poem of the "Spleen et ideal" section; The time, classic theme of romantic poetry and "The Flowers of Evil" is for Baudelaire, a weird weight when the poet is bored, a torture. Here is represented with the object of measurement, marking the victory of melancholy on the ideal through the image of an omnipotent and destructive time that plunges man towards death.
In this poetry Baudelaire resumes the traditional theme of time by innovating and presenting a particularly dramatic and distressing vision that highlights the tragic nature of the human condition. There is time in its units with the adjectives that translate the effect of time on man with physical sensations. Here the Parisian poet takes notice of human submission at the time and that the characteristic of man is transience.
But in the same section of this composition we find the poem "The taste of nothingness" where in the final part there is a direct reference to the devouring time to which the poet finds solution in the pre-established attitude in the title:
Baudelaire's folding on the sentiment of time leads to shores on which the waves of the impossible can stand, supports melancholy under low, heavy, rainy skies and gathers the turmoil of feelings under the domination of an atrocious and tyrannical anguish.

### Italo Svevo

Aron Ettore Schmitz (19 December 1861 – 13 September 1928), better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. In his work Zeno's Conscience, aroused great interest especially because he treat the concept of time through the novel, in a new way. The novel's time is that of consciousness, a time not subject to the objective laws of orderly succession, and this affects the choice of events to be represented and, consequently, also the narrative structure, which in this case is not constituted by a chronological sequence of events but is subdivided into five narrative nuclei, each of which represents a fundamental moment in Zeno's life. For this reason, the novel can be considered a work in progress, subject to numerous additions or deletions of parts. He almost relives to his conscience pieces of his past, canceling the temporal distance and immersing the past events in an eternal present. Time, being a spiral, does not presuppose any conclusion of the novel: it remains unfinished, because accomplishment would be madness or absurdity in a world without center and coordinated or because the very substance of reality is non-sense. For him time is not irreversible, the past returns, hangs on present. Time for me is not that unthinkable thing that never stops.

### James Joyce

James Joyce's (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) new novel and the 20th century novel in general, distinguish from the 19th century novel because of the loss of a common view of things which shows itself in relativism. Modernism is the new literary movement which started at the beginning of the 20th century and modernist writers try to explore the chaotic and fragmentary contemporary reality. The construction of the plot is based on private interpretations of reality: now the novelist presents a world which does not depend on a single criterion of significance at all, so an event or a character becomes important or trivial in base of the importance which the author gives to it. Objectivity lets its place to subjectivity and the novel’s structure is influenced by a new concept of time, taken also from Henri Bergson's theory of durée of time as a “flow and duration” according to which time is not a series of moments moving forward in progress, so there is not a hero who moves through a sequence of circumstances in chronological order. In consciousness and subconsciousness past experiences are retained and determine the whole of a character’s personality. All this pushed Joyce- like Proust in “In Search of Lost Time” and Svevo in “Zeno's Conscience”- to write a discontinuous, unforeseeable plot, thanks to narrative techniques such as the stream of consciousness. This technique attempts to reproduce and record the thoughts of the characters: the writer presents directly the uninterrupted flow of character's impressions and feelings without the conventional devices of dialogue and description.
This is a very interesting rows about the concept of time in Joyce :

### Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) treats the concept of time in one of her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway. On the other hand, it is no accident that Woolf initially decided to name the book The Hours. Each character is identified according to its relation to time, naturally we are faced with two types of temporality, the external one, easily identifiable by both the information that makes us discover the date, the historical period, and the jumps of the Big Ben, but also, and perhaps above all, an interior temporality, directly linked to those "caves" that open within each character. How long can last a moment? Virginia Woolf has succeeded in an achievement that has incredible in literature, has succeeded not only in describing the moment, but in dissecting it, showing it slowing down to the reader, transforming it radically and extending its lifetime to infinity. In Mrs. Dalloway, the narrative focuses on various events affecting different people and various points in London, but all of them happen at the same time. Parallel planes meet and people touch and with that unconscious touch they create a continuous network of connections to build an inextricable plot that interweaves even with the different temporal planes. Yes, because in this extraordinary book the extension of the moment reaches what was past, but that here is continually linked to the present until all the transitional scans are canceled and a single time and place is established.

### Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) treats in a very interesting way the concept of time in his masterpiece Waiting for Godot. Towards the beginning of the play, Vladimir and Estragon argued about whether or not they were waiting for Godot at the correct location and argued about what they had done yesterday. While Estragon insisted that they had waited in the same place the day before, he said that he didn’t recognize it. At first Vladimir disagreed with him, but even he later expressed some doubt when he said to Estragon, “But you said we were here yesterday.” (8-9) This situation presents a problem in logic, for why would they not remember what they did the day before and, if they did wait in the same place yesterday, why would they not recognize the landscape? The answer, beyond a simple explanation citing their faulty memories, is that for Vladimir and Estragon it did not really matter what they had done the day before or where they were on that day. Their lives would have been the same even if this day was somehow skipped, a fact that their deficient memories support.
Another example of this faulty memory occurred when Vladimir mentioned the time that he and Estragon had spent in Macon country picking grapes. Estragon did not remember this period, and even Vladimir has trouble remembering details of their time there, such as the name of the man for whom they worked. (67-68) Both of these events seem illogical considering that they probably would have spent a great deal of time there because it was their place of employment. Again it seems as though Vladimir and Estragon’s lives would have changed little minus this extensive period.
The repetition of the play provides further evidence of the unimportance of time for Vladimir and Estragon. Both acts are identical excluding a few small deviations. With one day after another being basically the same during their wait, it is no wonder that Vladimir and Estragon had trouble telling one day from the next and that they had trouble remembering what happened during each day. Because of this lack of significant change, time had no meaning for them, and therein lies the larger theme that these scenes help to convey. If the day before was meaningless and if most of the periods before this were meaningless, time itself was meaningless for them as well. As Estragon said at the beginning of the second day in reference to that day, “For me it’s over and done with, no matter what happens,” (64) which suggested his own realization of the meaninglessness of that day and of time itself.
By extension this can be made to apply to all of humankind as well. Life is a lengthy period of waiting, during which the passage of time has little importance. Each day Vladimir and Estragon waited for Godot, and, if he didn’t come that day they would come back tomorrow. (9) The amount of time that they had already spent doing this and the amount of time that would do so in the future is unknown, but neither is important because time was meaningless for them. Each day they would continue to wait for the unknown Godot until he either came or time ended through their death.
If a literal interpretation of the text is employed, one might wonder why the pair did not do something to end their waiting, such as searching for Godot, but, if one takes a more metaphoric look at the play, Godot becomes something for which the pair may have to wait. Because it was never revealed conclusively who or what Godot was, this unknown force can be seen to metaphorically represent that for which the audience is waiting in their own lives. The audience relates to these protagonists because waiting is common for all. While the event for which each person is waiting may change, the waiting continues until each individual’s death. Two examples of something that waiting for Godot may represent are waiting for God or waiting for death. Indeed, several times throughout the play Vladimir and Estragon discuss hanging themselves, an action that would have ended their continual waiting, but they found themselves unable to do it. (12) No acceptable path existed for them to end their waiting and, therefore, they were forced to wait. Through this, the play showed that there are things for which one must wait and that no amount of initiative will end this waiting.
The play emphasized the common nature of waiting among all people, and, therefore, it suggested that the meaningless of time is universal. If one is always waiting for something to happen, the periods during that wait end up being meaningless, and, if the event finally does happen, the process repeats itself. If that something never occurs all time becomes a meaningless wait. In any case, one is always caught in a period in which time has no purpose and waiting is the only goal. This idea was demonstrated well in Waiting For Godot, for throughout the play the protagonists waited and nothing memorable seemed to happen. From this one can surmise that time has no meaning.
The overall theme of the meaninglessness of time presented itself many times throughout the play, often during what seemed to be silly arguments between Vladimir and Estragon. Only by looking at the deeper meaning of these often illogical conversations and by combining them with other supporting details of the play can one discover how these logic problems relate to the whole. In this case they are used to present the themes, one of which was the idea of arbitrary and meaningless time.

## Tasks

Write down an essay in which you have to talk about a main topic in relationship of this page. Some guidelines could be :
-How the concept of time has changed over the years. -Which is the common point on where the most of all of the writers according to? -Treat about the differents point of view between the writers. -