Meadowlark Lemons.

25th April 2011

Post with 1 note

l’atmosphère du temps

Étienne-Jules Marey - Le Vol du Pelican (1882 - Gelatin Silver Print)

“Time itself presents us with the prime model of this permanent acquisition. If time is the dimension in accordance with which events drive each other successively from the scene, it is also that in accordance with which each one of them wins its unchallengeable place. To say that an event takes place is to say that it will always be true that it has taken place. Each moment of time, in virtue of its very essence, posits an existence against which the other moments of time are powerless. After the construction is drawn, the geometrical relation is acquired; even if I forget the details of the proof, the mathematical gesture establishes a tradition. Van Gogh’s paintings have their place in me for all time, a step is taken from which I cannot retreat, and, even though I retain no clear recollection of the pictures which I have seen, my whole subsequent aesthetic experience will be that of someone who has become acquainted with the painting of Van Gogh, exactly as a middle class man turned workman always remains, even in his manner of being a workman, a middle class man turned workman, or as an act confers a certain quality upon us for ever, even though we may afterwards repudiate it and change our beliefs. Existence always carries forward its past, whether it be by accepting or disclaiming it. We are, as Proust declared, perched on a pyramid of past life, and if we do not see this, it is because we are obsessed by objective thought. We believe that our past, for ourselves, is reducible to the express memories which we are able to contemplate. We sever our existence from the past itself, and allow it to pick up only those threads of the past which are present. But how are these threads to be recognized as threads of the past unless we enjoy in some other way a direct opening upon that past? Acquisition must be accepted as an irreducible phenomenon. What we have experienced is, and remains, permanently ours; and in old age a man is still in contact with his youth. Every present as it arises is driven into time like a wedge and stakes its claim to eternity. Eternity is not another order of time, but the atmosphere of time.”

-Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 475)